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.

Feeling Like It Wasn't

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-103
Author(s):  
Rae Greiner
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
Or History ◽  
The Way ◽  
The French Revolution

In “Is There a Problem with Historical Fiction (or with Scott's Redgauntlet)?”—an essay, as it happens, on Sir Walter Scott's great counterfactual novel—Harry E. Shaw calls on literary critics more fully to register “the remarkable variety of things history can do in novels, by short-circuiting the assumption that the representation of history in fiction is really always doing the same sort of work, or should be.” History might be a source of imaginative energy, a sort of launching pad for a book about timeless truths, as in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (“ultimately about individual sacrifice and transcendence, not about the French Revolution in the way in which Scott's Waverley is about the Forty-Five”); or the past might function as “a pastoral,” which is to say, as a field onto which authors project the concerns of their own times, as in Romola (depicting problems “in definitively Victorian terms and then project[ing them] back on to Renaissance Italy,” where they would have been understood quite differently [176–77]). Or history, what Shaw calls “objective history,” might be a work's actual subject (180). An historical novel of this last sort tells it like it was, or tries to. But even that novel is only doing so much, only making a use of history. Georg Lukács is therefore wrong in thinking that “a sufficiently dialectical mode of representation could capture everything” (Shaw 175). No one mode can capture all of even a highly delimited history at once.

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.

“Children of Liberty”: Idealist Historiography in Staël, Shelley, and Sand

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kari Lokke
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Shelley ◽  
George Sand ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Spirit World ◽  
Historical Agency ◽  
The French Revolution

This essay explores the contributions of a tradition of nineteenth-century Künstlerromane by Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, and George Sand to European idealist historiography as exemplified in Kant's writings on perfectibility. Corinne, Valperga, and Consuelo represent the historical agency of the intellectual and artist as communication with a spirit world inhabited by ghosts of the past so that their secrets and wisdom can be transmitted to the future. In canonical Romanticism, contact with these phantasms provokes crippling guilt over the failure of past projects of perfectibility like the French Revolution (doomed by violence and bloodshed), guilt that is figured in the interdependent tropes of the titanic hero and Romantic melancholy. The novels discussed here perform an explicit critique of masculinist individualism in the name of women and humanity as a whole, replacing melancholy with enthusiasm and deploying spirits aesthetically, as sublime signs of future historical potentiality.

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.

POLITICAL CULTURE, POLITICAL CLASS, AND POLITICAL COMMUNITY

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 311-315
Author(s):  
D. L. L. PARRY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Community ◽  
French History ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Political Class ◽  
The Past ◽  
The French Revolution

The past in French history. By Robert Gildea. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Pp. xiv+418. £30.00. ISBN 0-300-05799-7Napoleon and his artists. By Timothy Wilson-Smith. London: Constable, 1996. Pp. xxx+306. £23.00. ISBN 0-094-76110-8Revolution and the meanings of freedom in the nineteenth century. Edited by Isser Woloch. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. viii+447. £40.00. ISBN 0-804-72748-1Over the past twenty years, Keith Baker, François Furet, Lynn Hunt, Mona Ozouf et al. have argued that the French Revolution gave birth to a new political culture, and by implication that one should study politics through this culture rather than through l'histoire événementielle of ministries and elections. The three books reviewed here all relate to political culture in the wake of the French Revolution, explicitly in The past in French history and implicitly in the other two volumes: under Napoleon, artistic culture was politicized and regimented, and after his fall nineteenth-century Europe was left to nurse the awkward offspring of 1789, the ideologies of revolution and freedom. Yet whilst these books provide fine studies of political culture, they make only passing references to two less clearly defined concepts which may be necessary adjuncts to such an approach. The first is that of a ‘political class’, meaning those who occupy office, usually by election and regardless of party, which enables one to put l'histoire événementielle aside, since elections or changes of cabinet are merely reshuffles within the political class. The second concept concerns the communities that create political cultures. What, though, creates these communities?

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.

Hazlitt as a Shakespearean Critic

PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry T. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
William Hazlitt ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Literary Fame ◽  
The French Revolution

When William Hazlitt died, in 1830, his literary fame was obscured by his political views. The man who admired Napoleon and wrote a biography of him and who championed the radical creed of the French Revolution could hardly have been expected to be popular among Englishmen of the early nineteenth century. During the past twenty-five years, however, several volumes containing selections from his essays have been issued; and most editions of Shakespeare enrich themselves by quoting his opinions. His Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, printed in 1817, is still very much alive. Heine, in his volume Shakespeare's Mädchen und Frauen (1838), declared: “With the exception of William Hazlitt, England has given us no Shakespearean commentator of any consequence.” And this verdict, though decidedly exaggerated, gains new interest when we append the Teutonic explosion: “It takes the very heart out of me when I remember that Shakespeare is an Englishman, and belongs to the most repulsive race which God in his wrath ever created.”

Mathematicians and the Nation in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century as Reflected in the Luigi Cremona Correspondence

2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Millán Gasca
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
Dominant Tendency ◽  
The Individual ◽  
National Membership ◽  
The French Revolution

ArgumentUp until the French Revolution, European mathematics was an “aristocratic” activity, the intellectual pastime of a small circle of men who were convinced they were collaborating on a universal undertaking free of all space-time constraints, as they believed they were ideally in dialogue with the Greek founders and with mathematicians of all languages and eras. The nineteenth century saw its transformation into a “democratic” but also “patriotic” activity: the dominant tendency, as shown by recent research to analyze this transformation, seems to be the national one, albeit accompanied by numerous analogies from the point of view of the processes of national evolution, possibly staggered in time. Nevertheless, the very homogeneity of the individual national processes leads us to view mathematics in the context of the national-universal tension that the spread of liberal democracy was subjected to over the past two centuries. In order to analyze national-universal tension in mathematics, viewed as an intellectual undertaking and a profession of the new bourgeois society, it is necessary to investigate whether the network of international communication survived the political, social, and cultural upheavals of the French Revolution and the European wars waged in the early nineteenth century, whether national passions have transformed this network, and if so, in what way. Luigi Cremona's international correspondence indicates that relationships among individuals have been restructured by the force of national membership, but that the universal nature of mathematics has actually been boosted by a vision shared by mathematicians from all countries concerning the role of their discipline in democratic and liberal society as the basis of scientific culture and technological innovation, as well as a basic component of public education.

Evangelical Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Mandal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Condition ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter examines evangelical fiction. It is unsurprising that the novel became a powerful tool in effecting the evangelicals’ mission to improve the moral condition of the nation. At the same time, the troublesome reputation of fiction, particularly in the wake of the French Revolution, caused fundamental problems for evangelical writers who remained anxious about the genre and their association with it. Nevertheless, these authors were able to blend populism with propriety through a careful traversing of theological, national, and generic boundaries, contributing significantly to the rehabilitation of the novel during the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the legacy of evangelicalism to fiction was the purging of many of its excesses and the legitimization of the novel from the mid-1810s onwards.

“A Bright Continuous Flow”: Phantasmagoria and History in A Tale of Two Cities

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 693-720
Author(s):  
Amanda Shubert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Fredric Jameson ◽  
Magic Lantern ◽  
The French Revolution

This essay explores how Charles Dickens's representation of history in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), his historical novel of the French Revolution, is influenced by the Phantasmagoria. The Phantasmagoria was an optical ghost show popularized in Paris in the 1790s by the showman Etienne Gaspard Robertson. Using a hidden magic lantern in a pitch-dark room, Robertson projected images of ghosts and skeletons as well as historical personages from the French Revolution. Drawing on Dickens's own writings on the Phantasmagoria, the essay argues that Dickens's approach to historical fiction is informed by the Phantasmagoria's medium-specific effects and its cultural association with history and historical memory. Specifically, Dickens's turn to a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity to represent historical temporality is influenced by the dialectical visual effects of the Phantasmagoria and related mid-nineteenth-century optical technologies. A Tale of Two Cities has always resisted the dialectical-materialist paradigm for the nineteenth-century historical novel first developed by Georg Lukács and more recently elaborated by Fredric Jameson. By employing a media archaeological framework, this essay offers a revitalized approach to Dickens's historical representation that contextualizes it within nineteenth-century theories and discourses of optical perception.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document