SUSPENSEFUL SPECULATION AND THE PLEASURE OF WAITING INLITTLE DORRIT

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Jewusiak
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Twin Brother

“Suspend it all,” writes Charles Dickens in the ninth number plan for his novelLittle Dorrit(“Working Notes” 207). Referring to the thirtieth chapter, in which Blandois – formerly Rigaud – arrives on the doorstep of Mrs. Clennam's house, this phrase aptly describes how much the chapter moves the plot forward. Mysteries are gestured toward, but the stakes of the mystery are left blank. Rigaud shows surprise upon seeing Flintwinch, but such surprise is inexplicable until we learn at the end of the novel that Rigaud has met Flintwinch's twin brother abroad. We learn more about the mysterious watch that the dying Mr. Clennam bequeathed to his wife, but not much more than the meaning of the letters “D.N.F.” inscribed within it: “Do not forget.” Dickens suspends so much from the reader that it is hard to feel suspense about anything, a fact that is amplified by Rigaud's insistence on “Secrets!” that can be read as a meta-commentary on the chapter itself: “I say there are secrets in all families,” he tells Flintwinch, adding that the house is “so mysterious” (381–82; bk.1, ch. 30).

scholarly journals “I am rather strong on Voyages and Cannibalism”: The other Dickens and other Victorians in Richard Flanagan’s Wanting

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-177
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Other ◽  
Public Image ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Critical Attitude ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
Public Persona

Abstract This paper analyses Richard Flanagan’s novel Wanting (2008) as a narrative informed by a revisionary and critical attitude to nineteenth-century ideologies, which is common to, and, indeed, stereotypical in much neo-Victorian fiction. Drawing on the biographies of two eminent Victorians: Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin, Flanagan constructs their fictional counterparts as split between a respectable, public persona and a dark, inner self. While all the Victorian characters are represented as “other” than their public image, the focus in the novel, and in this paper, is on Dickens’s struggle to reconcile social propriety with his personal discontent. Flanagan represents this conflict through Dickens’s response to the allegations that starving survivors of Franklin’s ill-fated Arctic expedition resorted to cannibalism. The zeal with which the Victorian writer refuted such reports reveals his own difficulty in living up to social and moral norms. The paper argues that the main link between the different narrative strands in the novel is the challenge they collectively pose to the distinction between the notions of civilization and savagery.

scholarly journals BIG AND SMALL WORLDS OF CHILDREN CHARACTERS IN ‘A LITTLE PRINCESS’ BY F. H. BURNETT

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 70-78
Author(s):  
Varvara A. Byachkova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Small World ◽  
Protective Mechanism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Small Worlds ◽  
The World ◽  
Space Organization

The article raises the topic of space organization in writings by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The object of analysis is the novel A Little Princess. The novel, addressed primarily to children and teenagers, has many similarities with David Copperfield and the works of Charles Dickens in general. The writer largely follows the literary tradition created by Dickens. The space of the main character is divided into three levels: the Big world (states and borders), the Small world (home, school, city) and the World of imagination. The first two worlds give the reader a realistic picture of Edwardian England, the colonial Empire, through the eyes of a child reveal the themes of unprotected childhood, which the writer develops following the literary tradition of the 19th century. The Big and Small worlds also perform an educational function, being a source of experience and impressions for the main character. In the novel, the aesthetic of realism is combined with folklore and fairy-tale elements: the heroine does not completely transform the surrounding space, but she manages to change it partially and also to preserve her own personality and dignity while experiencing the Dickensian drama of child disenfranchisement, despair and loneliness. The World of imagination allows the reader to understand in full the character of Sarah Crewe, demonstrates the dynamics of her growing up, while for herself it is a powerful protective mechanism that enables her to pass all the tests of life and again become a happy child who can continue to grow up and develop.

Emigration Aesthetics: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Catherine Helen Spence

2018 ◽  
pp. 161-190
Author(s):  
Fariha Shaikh
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Global Network ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
Martin Chuzzlewit ◽  
A Site

Chapter Five takes up this reading and interrogates the ways in emigration literature becomes a trope in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield (1850), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854). This chapter asserts that to ask how central or liminal emigration is to the plot of the novel is to miss the point. What is far more interesting is the ways in which the novels discussed here register the effects of emigration. They draw on the familiar tropes of emigration literature, but at the same time, they imagine a world in which emigration literature connects emigrants and their families and weaves them into the larger global network of the British empire. Thus, collectively, the last two chapters of this book demonstrate the hold that emigration literature had over the cultural imagination. Not only does it produce a stock of common tropes that other genres and media drew on, it also becomes a motif in them, a site of interrogation for the interrogation of texts that produced a widening settler world.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
The Media

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.

‘These Acres of Print’: Charles Dickens, the News and the Novel as Pattern

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-58
Author(s):  
Jessica R. Valdez
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Serial Output ◽  
Benedict Anderson ◽  
Serial Publication ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City ◽  
Serial Fiction ◽  
Over Time

While Benedict Anderson has argued that newspapers enable readers to imagine national community, Charles Dickens’s writings are attentive to the varying ways that the newspaper press might shape, inhibit, or fragment community through its uncontrolled production of miscellaneous content and matter. This first chapter shows the growing distinction that Dickens drew between fiction and nonfiction, novel and newspaper, in his communal visions for serial publication. Early Dickens characterised the newspaper press as a meteorological force of destruction, a thunderstorm threatening to engulf the city of London, yet continually produced to meet the endless public appetite for more news. Over the course of his career, Dickens experimented with other metaphors for the working of serial narrative and its influence on a reading public. From an intangible creature telling stories to a weaver at his loom, Dickens encourages readers to see the instance of a particular serial output linked to its larger structure over time. In doing so, he privileges the power of serial fiction to cultivate new ways of envisioning community.

Irving, John

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Champion
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Personal History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
John Irving ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The World ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Popular Novel ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Looking Back

A major American writer, John Irving has published many novels, several of which have been adapted for film. His most popular novel is The World According to Garp, which has become both a popular and a cult classic. He is often compared to Charles Dickens, an author he admires. His novels are often political and take liberal views, confronting issues such as abortion rights, LGBT rights, and antiwar sentiments. His characters are not shy about sex and often begin sexual encounters at a young age. Major themes and subjects in his novels include the search for the father, the search for identity, looking back at one’s life, searching for one’s personal history, the difference between memory and truth, and unconventional lifestyles. The settings of his novels vary, and sometimes his characters travel both nationally and internationally. Many of his novels have been adapted for film, and he wrote screenplays for some of them. Irving became a household name in 1978, with the publication of The World According to Garp. Irving is well known for his dark sense of humor and sometimes absurd situations in which he places his characters. Many of his protagonists are older men who look back on their childhoods or adolescents who develop into men over the course of the novel. The relationship between memory and fact is often blurred as one’s memory of events trumps the actual events. Most of Irving’s protagonists are males who do not come from traditional families.

scholarly journals INTRALINGUAL TRANSLATION: A SIMPLIFIED VERSION OF THE ORIGINAL NOVEL DAVID COPPERFIELD

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 353-357
Author(s):  
Fani Hafizah ◽  
Syahron Lubis ◽  
Muhizar Muchtar
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Original Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Translation Technique ◽  
Translation Techniques ◽  
Total Data ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
Descriptive Qualitative

The objectives of this project are to describe the intralingual translation techniques used in translating the original novel David Copperfield into a simplified version and to find out the reasons why the translator made a simplified version of the original novel David Copperfield written by Charles Dickens. This study used the descriptive qualitative method. The data were collected by reading the novel, comparing the original and simplified texts of David Copperfield, identifying, classifying, counting, and concluding the results. The theory of Jakobson was used to analyze the data related to intralingual translation techniques. The results of the study showed that from the total data (20 texts from the original novel David Copperfield and 20 texts from the simplified version), the paraphrasing technique was used 6 times and the summarizing technique was used 14 times. Besides, the most dominant intralingual translation technique used by the translator is the summarizing technique. The reasons why the translator used paraphrasing and summarizing techniques in making the intralingual translation of the original novel into a simplified version were also found. Firstly, the original novel consists of 750 pages, which are easier to read by making the summary of the novel into 238 pages using the summarizing technique. Secondly, the original novel consists of many difficult words, which can hinder the comprehension of the reader whereas in the simplified version the novel was paraphrased by using the paraphrasing technique. 

scholarly journals Plotting Sensation Stories: Affect and Intuition in Short Sensation Fiction

2000 ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
Brittany Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Mistaken Identity ◽  
Difficult Time

The British short story is still an understudied form in Victorian studies, and particularly so in studies of sensation fiction. Despite rich and growing scholarship on sensation fiction and its relationship with literary markets and commodity culture, scholars have a had a difficult time shaking off its enduring brand “the novel with a secret,” which has problematically discounted an incredible body of periodical fiction that falls “short” of our expectations about what this kind of fiction looks like. Short periodical works, however, are crucial if we are to understand the nexus of consumerism, mass marketing, social anxiety, and literary production that first peaked in the 1860s, things which have largely come to organise our understanding of what was so sensational about this historical moment in time. This essay compares short and long works from Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, and J.S. Le Fanu to explore how short stories could take up common themes and features of sensation novels (mistaken identity, unchecked passion, family secrets, shocking revelations, etc.) while also considering how formal considerations of length encouraged greater reliance on impressions and feelings to resolve conflicts in the text. These sensation stories so often suggest that deviance is best discerned through the body rather than the mind, and they create a path to pleasurable revelation where trusting one’s gut offers the most effective form of policing. These supposedly “unimportant” periodical works – sensational not only in the way they glutted periodicals with their sheer volume – could in turn promote suspicion and distrust in readers that were capable of damaging real-life bonds and relationships. Although short fiction could provoke anxieties about shifting roles and hierarchies in an increasingly fast-paced, automated British society, the tremendous visibility of the novel effectively shielded them from comparable criticism.

scholarly journals Ten books

2007 ◽  
Vol 191 (6) ◽  
pp. 567-570
Author(s):  
Allan Beveridge
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Ethical Reasoning ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
The World ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Mind

In the novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens gives his views on education. His character Mr Gradgrind believes in ‘facts’ and is suspicious of the imagination. All we need to know about the world, he maintains, can be reduced to simple facts. Dickens shows that such a philosophy leads to the impoverishment of the mind and to the weakening of ethical reasoning. Today it seems that the descendants of Mr Gradgrind are still in charge. The main psychiatric library where I work has been closed. It is argued that we can obtain all the ‘facts’ we need from the internet. The notion that books might have more to offer than prosaic detail, that they reflect the rich diversity of human experience, seems alien to the modern-day Gradgrinds.

scholarly journals Depiction of Victorian Era in the Novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. p17
Author(s):  
Farhana Haque
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Great Expectation ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Class System ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Middle Class Family

Charles Dickens’ Great Expectation actually did reflect the Victorian society and therefore the morality of that era’s people inside of the novel. Since we know that Victorian era basically present some features such as virtue, strength, thrift, manners, cleanliness, honesty and chastity. These are the morals that Victorian people used to hold with high esteem. In this novel Great Expectations, Dickens has created some Victorian characters whom we have seen both in good working way or not at all. But the protagonist named Pip was dynamic and he went through some several changes and dealt with different and significant moral issues. Somehow Pip left behind all the values he was raised with. Because Miss Havisham and Estella have corrupted Pip with rich life. Greed, beauty and arrogance were his ingredient of immoral life. The other characters like Joe and Biddy were static characters throughout the entire novel and became noticeable to be the manifestation of what we call as ideal Victorians. The main heroin of this novel was Estella with whom Pip thought he had some love connection. Hence, Estella has been presented as a good in the sense of potentiality and turned morally bad. Miss Havisham, who was basically a corrupt woman and she engraved the center of the novel. Great Expectations did disclose how was the situation of Victorian society through some important features such as higher class, corrupted judicial system between rural and urban England. Here in this novel, Dickens was concern about the education system in Victorian era where the lower class people get less opportunities of getting proper education. From the beginning to the end of this novel, Dickens explored some significant issues regarding higher and lower class system of Victorian society which did fluctuate from the greatest woeful criminal named Magwitch to the needy people of the swamp country, where Joe and Biddy were the symbol of that regime. After that we can proceed to the middle class family where Pumblechook was the person to represent that regime. Last but not the least Miss Havisham symbolized and bear flag of very rich and sophisticated Victorian woman who has represented the higher class society in the novel Great Expectations. Hence we can say Great Expectations has talked and displayed the class system of Victorian England and the characters of this novel therefore also did uphold the true reflection of Victorian era.

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