Suspending Unbelief

2021 ◽  
pp. 119-146
Author(s):  
Gretchen Murphy
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
Slave Revolts ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter interprets Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s novel Redwood as her response to a challenge posed by William Ellery Channing: to add an accession of feeling to overly-cool Unitarianism. Redwood responds to Channing’s challenge and to the period’s larger orthodox backlash against Unitarianism by reconciling liberalism with the conviction of belief, a balance that Sedgwick presents as essential for national cohesion in a post-revolutionary context. The novel portrays this post-revolutionary context as threatened by various forms of radicalism (slave revolts, class resentment, Shaker enthusiasm) that the novel links to memories of the French Revolution. It offers sentimental Protestant Christianity, characterized by a balance of zealous belief and broadminded tolerance, as the solution, albeit one that is expressly intolerant to non-Christians and unbelievers. The chapter draws on correspondence, sermons, and religious print culture to explain these theological and political problems and imagined solutions in Sedgwick’s novel.

scholarly journals History as a discourse in Jeanette Winterson's "The passion" : the politics of alterity

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
María del Mar Asensio Aróstegui
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Choice ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
Historical Material ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The French Revolution

Set in the historical context of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Jeanette Winterson's The Passion is an outstanding example of the kind of fiction that Elizabeth Wesseling (1991: vii) calls postmodernist historical novels, that is, "novelistic adaptations of historical material". Besides, being profoundly self-reflexive, the novel also falls under Linda Hutcheon's (1988) category of historiographic metafiction. The present paper focuses on Winterson's political choice of two representatives of historically silenced groups, a soldier and a woman, who use two apparently opposed narrative modes, the historical and the fantastic, to tell a story that both exposes history as a discursive construct and provides an alternative fantastic discourse for the representation of feminine desire.

Nothing Personal

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Stout
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Logical Consequence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The People ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
The Right ◽  
The French Revolution

Chapter four looks at Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. By examining parallels between the novel and Robespierre’s political philosophy, this chapter argues that Dickens’s novel understands the French Revolution not as an event that gave individuals the right of self-governance but as the event that formalized a conception of citizenship in which individual persons stand as avatars for the national will. The Revolutionary Terror and the guillotine are thus seen as the logical consequence of a theory of the nation that prioritized the People over individual persons.

Nation and Generation in A Tale of Two Cities

PMLA ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 448-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert D. Hutter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Generational Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Critical Model ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Critical Methods ◽  
The French Revolution

A Tale of Two Cities, the French Revolution becomes a metaphor for the conflicts between generations and between classes that preoccupied Dickens throughout his career. Dickens uses a double plot and divided characters to express these conflicts; his exaggerated use of “splitting”—which the essay defines psychoanalytically—sometimes makes A Tale of Two Cities‘ language and structure appear strained and humorless. We need to locate A Tale of Two Cities within a framework of nineteenth-century attitudes toward revolution and generational conflict by using a combination of critical methods—literary, historical, psychoanalytic. This essay relates the reader's experience to the structure of the text; and it derives from Dickens’ language, characterization, and construction a critical model that describes the individual reader's experience while explaining some of the contradictory assessments of the novel over the past hundred years.

Dickens’s Neutral Philosophy of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 1123
Author(s):  
Ali Abdullah AL-Zuhairi
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Decent Life ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Full Power ◽  
French People ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Revolutionary Period ◽  
The French Revolution

This paper delves into Charles Dickens’s objectivity of the events of the French Revolution and his unique stand and transparency in his representation for the two great power rivals and their prolonged conflict. The pre-revolutionary period was remarkable for the tyranny, cruelty, Socioeconomic-Inequality, and Subjugation of the Barbarous aristocratic rule against the masses. Conversely, the post-revolutionary period underwent sweeping social and political chaos and the form of administration set after the revolution was not a democracy, as French people were fond of calling it, but a mischievous and shameful anarchy lasted from 1789 until 1799. This discussion is an attempt to analyze and sort out a complex of hostile relationships involving the aristocrats and the peasants of A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens’ universal appeal indicates that whoever is in authority, aristocracy or masses, will get lavishly tempted to practice their full power depressingly and be obsessed with the dilemma of the establishment of the supremacy and dictatorship at any cost ignoring other’s right in decent life , freedom ,and equal opportunity. As the novel advanced, oppression is shown to breed oppression; violence to beget violence, evil to provoke evil. Instead of progress there is something more like the catastrophic continuum and piling wreckage upon wreckage.

scholarly journals Understanding Violence in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-48
Author(s):  
Mohammed Rasul Murad Akoi
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Psychological Approach ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
Inherent Part ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This paper, Understanding Violence in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, deals with violence in its various forms in Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities. The novel recounts the French Revolution of 1789. In the novel, Dickens portrays a terrifying scene of blood and brutality. Violence appears in different forms. Critics have paid attention to Charles Dickens’ own fear of a similar revolution in England. The paper attempts to find the substance of that fear. The paper will discuss the three forms of violence in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities; namely, violence as an inherent part of the French Revolution; violence committed by the crowds or mobs, and the evil that rises and grows as the Revolution continues. It will be argued that Dickens’ depiction of the crowd and mob behavior in A Tale of Two Cities captures the potential which is in the mentality of any crowd to grow violent. That is, a seemingly innocent start could lead to evil. A socio-psychological approach will also be consulted to analyze violence in the novel; violence as part of the revolution; violence committed by the mobs, and finally how the revolutionary masses turn evil.

Mediating Print Culture: Censorship, Revolutionary Journalism and the Manifesto of Equals

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanja Perovic
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
First Time ◽  
The French Revolution

Freedom of expression and censorship are frequently cast in opposing but symmetrical terms. According to the conventional narrative, the right to free speech was acquired when first the American and then the French Revolution overthrew the repressive censorship apparatus of the ancien régime. However this account of increasing emancipation overlooks the important role played by the French Revolution in establishing a new definition of censorship that was both tolerant of free speech and repressive of political difference. This paper contends that precisely when political representation in the widest possible sense is at stake, freedom of speech cannot be reduced solely to a question of rights. It begins by revisiting the Directory period when the enlightened ideal of an unmediated public sphere openly clashed for the first time with the opposing ideal of an ‘unmediated’ or ‘popular’ sovereignty promoted by the radical press. It then focuses on the Conspiracy of Equals to show how the presumed neutrality of the liberal press was forged by repressing competing understandings of the right to free speech. Rather than assume that revolutionary propaganda is the ‘other’ of liberalism, this paper demonstrates the joint origins of both liberal and revolutionary understandings of free speech in the new censorship laws that attempted to separate the message from the medium of revolution.

The Structural and Ideological Significance of Vigny's “Man of Destiny” in Stello

PMLA ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-283
Author(s):  
Joyce O. Lowrie
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Part Time ◽  
The French Revolution

In Part III of Stello Vigny's concept of Destiny in historical and personal events is set forth by Blaireau, Doctor Noir's servant who is also part-time gunner in the French Revolution. Blaireau's first appearance reflects the fact that radical political changes can occur in one man's lifetime, and this reinforces Vigny's larger point in the novel, that to seek political fortune is a tenuous and vulnerable business. Blaireau's second appearance demonstrates Vigny's notions on the existence of blind Chance in history as opposed to Joseph de Maistre's idea of a beneficent Providence. In his third appearance Blaireau unwittingly causes the downfall of Robespierre and is consequently called “l'homme de la Destinée” by Doctor Noir. By “Destiny” Vigny means the capriciousness of events that alter the lives of persons and of nations. As for man's freedom, Vigny provides man with a leeway whereby he can mold events in his life and direct, to a certain extent, the powers of Destiny. While only “superior men” succeed at this, all men, including Blaireau, are given the possibility for doing so. Negatively Blaireau demonstrates the vulnerability of political fortune; positively he implies the possibility of resisting the powers that rule over man. His three appearances at beginning, middle, and end of the Chénier episode give esthetic and ideological unity to the work.

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