Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels. J. Hillis Miller , Charles Dickens

1959 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-71
Author(s):  
Bradford A. Booth
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The World

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.

scholarly journals A Writer’s Guide to Understanding Charles Dickens’s "George Silverman’s Explanation"

Meliora ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chaya Sara Oppenheim
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
Growth Trajectory ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Comprehensive Treatise ◽  
New Perspective

 This thesis proposes that “George Silverman’s Explanation”—the last short story completed by Charles Dickens—should be read as Dickens’s final and most comprehensive treatise on writing. The argument states that Dickens, instead of outlining an explicit approach to the writing process, utilizes the narrative of George Silverman as an allegory to detail the formation of a story. The thesis suggests that the framework of “George Silverman’s Explanation” portrays the growth trajectory of the writer and his eternal struggle to create original work from the world of literature that precedes him. For a renowned author like Dickens, approaching his last short story as his departing discourse on the construction of literature is invaluable instruction for future writers. Interestingly, “George Silverman’s Explanation” is also Dickens’s least analyzed work. For this reason, this thesis addresses essentially all of the scholarship that has been written on the short story before preceding to add a new perspective on how the short story can be approached. Understanding this short story as a blueprint for writers provides an innovative and unique angle for approaching literature, since a writer reads with their eyes on the future—and the original works that they can create.

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.

Food and Drink

2020 ◽  
pp. 296-308
Author(s):  
Paul Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The World ◽  
Special Quality ◽  
Food And Drink

Christmas food traditions around the world differ, both as to what foods and drinks are consumed and when the main festive meal takes place (Christmas Day, Christmas Eve, or Epiphany). Charles Dickens can be credited or blamed for many aspects of what are now regarded as age-old Christmas foods and ceremonies. The countries with the greatest international influence have been Germany and Britain, providing models especially for sweet cakes and biscuits. Christmas food tends to evoke a more-or-less medieval precedent, one emphasizing good cheer rather than religious adoration. Spicy and sugary treats such as gingerbread, and food or drink seldom eaten at other times (eggnog, plum pudding) give the occasion a special quality, connected to an imagined past.

Charles Dickens. The World of His Novels

1960 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 433
Author(s):  
Barbara Hardy ◽  
J. Hillis Miller
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The World

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.

Charles Dickens, the World of his Novels

1959 ◽  
Vol 6 (7) ◽  
pp. 294-295
Author(s):  
Sheila M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The World

Imagining Ithaca

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Riley
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Great War ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Wizard Of Oz ◽  
Woody Allen ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The World ◽  
Returning Home ◽  
The Great War

‘Though home is a name, a word, it is a strong one’, said Charles Dickens, ‘stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.’ The ancient Greek word nostos, meaning homecoming or return, has a commensurate power and mystique. Irish philosopher-poet John Moriarty described it as ‘a teeming word … a haunted word … a word to conjure with’. The most celebrated and culturally enduring nostos is that of Homer’s Odysseus who spent ten years returning home after the fall of Troy. His journey back involved many obstacles, temptations, and fantastical adventures and even a katabasis, a rare descent by the living into the realm of the dead. All the while he was sustained and propelled by his memories of Ithaca (‘His native home deep imag’d in his soul’, as Pope’s translation has it). From Virgil’s Aeneid to James Joyce’s Ulysses, from MGM’s The Wizard of Oz to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and from Derek Walcott’s Omeros to Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, the Odyssean paradigm of nostos and nostalgia has been continually summoned and reimagined by writers and filmmakers. At the same time, ‘Ithaca’ has proved to be an evocative and versatile abstraction. It is as much about possibility as it is about the past; it is a vision of Arcadia or a haunting, an object of longing, a repository of memory, ‘a sleep and a forgetting’. In essence it is about seeking what is absent. Imagining Ithaca explores the idea of nostos, and its attendant pain (algos), in an excitingly eclectic range of sources: from Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, through the exilic memoirs of Nabokov and the time-travelling fantasies of Woody Allen, to Seamus Heaney’s Virgilian descent into the London Underground and Michael Portillo’s Telemachan railway journey to Salamanca. This kaleidoscopic exploration spans the end of the Great War, when the world at large was experiencing the complexities of homecoming, to the era of Brexit and COVID-19 which has put the notion of nostalgia firmly under the microscope.

Charles Dickens As Artist and Reformer

1971 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 92-98
Author(s):  
Ronald M. Meldrum
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
The World ◽  
Good For ◽  
Definition Of

“Girl number twenty … give me your definition of a horse,” ordered Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, “a man of realities, a man of facts and calculations.” Mr. Gradgrind, master of a pragmatic school devoted to teaching facts in Mr. Josiah Bounderby's model industrial community, Coketown, was, like most of Charles Dickens' schoolmasters, rather narrow in his conception of what school should and might be. No doubt the shortcomings and lack of uniformity of the schools with which Dickens was familiar tended to sour him generally on the topic of education. Of course, Dickens was too clever to wish for utter uniformity or conformity in education. In a speech November 5, 1873. he said: I don't like that sort of school — and I have seen a great many such in these latter times — where the bright childish imagination is utterly discouraged, and where those bright childish faces, which it is so very good for the wisest among us to remember in after life, when the world is too much with us early and late, are gloomily and grimly scared out of countenance; where I have never seen among the pupils, whether boys or girls, anything but little parrots and small calculating machines.

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