scholarly journals Symbolism in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837-9): A critical study: الرمزية الأدبية في رواية تشارلز ديكنز "أوليفر تويست" دراسة نقدية

Author(s):  
Rajaa Radwan Hillis Rajaa Radwan Hillis

When Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist in the 1830s, poverty and crime were huge problems in London. To highlight these problems throughout his novel, the author used various literary techniques to create an interaction between the reader and the text in which text can have multiple meanings that can shift over the time.  Thus, he uses symbols to evoke a range of additional meaning and significance. His purpose is to get the reader’s attention to construct meaning as the plot progress to what he intends to communicate about innocent individuals or villainous ones. Symbolism, irony, and satire were among the tools he used in his work. They work together to convey a deeper embedded meaning to cast suggestions about the development of the novel to emphasize the point the author seeks to stress throughout the novel. Drawing upon the importance of literary devices in unfolding the thematic concerns of the novel, this paper seeks to run an in-depth analysis of how symbolism played a vital role throughout Oliver Twist. The paper argues that through symbolism, the author channels meaning in Oliver Twist to develop the thematic concerns of the novel in creative ways to shape the reader’s response and to create a strong bond between the reader and the text. The paper argues that literary symbolism in Charles Dickens’s novel is based on evoking the mental image in the reader’s mind to structure meaning through his/her interaction with the text and then shaping his response according to his/her experience. It also creates a strong bond between the reader and the text.

Author(s):  
Khaled Abkar Alkodimi

Majority of world opinion today is critical of Israel’s role in the current standoff with Palestine fueled by the illegitimate occupation of the West Bank, depriving millions of Palestinians of their homeland. Yet, almost all non-Islamic countries maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, recognizing it as a country. The plight of the Palestinians, especially the children uprooted from their homes and forced to lead lives of depravation as refugees as a result of Israeli occupation has become a subject for insightful writings by many writers and critics, including Abulhawa who in Mornings in Jenin, skillfully employs language to showcase not the political tragedy (though it operates as the background) but the personal one. This paper textually analyzes Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin to explore the author’s use of the literary metaphor to expose not only the reality in Palestine, but more importantly, the horror of Israeli violence against Palestinians, trauma both physical and psychological. The study further highlights how the author raises a significant question: Who is the real terrorist in Palestine? The findings show that the novel utilizes several literary techniques to bring forth Israeli terrorism and Palestinian agony under Israeli occupation. Via language use, Abulhawa concludes that it’s the Israeli occupation, brutality and aggression that leads to Palestinian resistance/terrorism. Mornings in Jenin, in other words, is an attempt by Susan Abulhawa to justify the means of resistance concluding that Israel is the actual terrorist and not the Palestinians who have a ‘just cause’ to resist Zionist colonization. What is remarkable is her ingenuous use of literary devices to achieve the desired effect on the readers.


2019 ◽  
pp. 106-111
Author(s):  
A. Buhrii

Modern American novel appears to be a type of novelistic prose, in which with the help of specific literary approach from the standpoint of conscious historicism the events with a real historical basis are recreated and discussed in the light of historical perspective. This idea is practically embodied in the novel "The Goldfinch" by D. Tartt, whose author experiments with the genre features of the novel, constructing within its boundaries her own modification using the method of reconstruction. The novel "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt has fragmented structure and numerous elements of the plot that resonate, reflecting each other and at the same time imitating the literary models of novels by Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Joanne Rowling. Engaging in a dialogue with predecessors through the deliberate use of literary techniques, creating the effects of intertextuality (borrowing and recycling of themes, explicit and implicit quotations, translations, plagiarism, allusion, paraphrase, imitation, parody, dramatization, the use of epigraphs, reminiscence), D. Tartt rewrites the authors’ life-style models and literary traditions according to her own worldview, preserving the most important and instantly recognizable in the prose if each artist. Here it is expedient to speak of the hermeneutical aspect of reconstruction, which seeks to reproduce the true meaning of the realities of the past and the present, by reproducing the situation of their occurrence. By introduction into the contemporary discourse certain elements and ideas of the previous cultures, a kind of dialogue space between the past and the present is created. Thus, the modern American novel attempts to revive some of the former literary codes, as well as to rework some of the artistic conventions of the past. The balance of historical perspective, the equilibrium of the past and the present in the new novel is achieved through the organic synthesis of contemporary postmodern and traditional realist strategies.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-80
Author(s):  
Evrea Ness-Bergstein

In Lewis’ transposition of Milton’s Paradise to a distant world where Adam and Eve do not succumb to Satan, the structure of Eden is radically different from the enclosed garden familiar to most readers. In the novel Perelandra (1944), C.S. Lewis represents the Garden of Eden as an open and ‘shifting’ place. The new Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve unfallen, is a place of indeterminate future, excitement, growth, and change, very unlike the static, safe, enclosed Garden—the hortus conclusus of traditional iconography—from which humanity is not just expelled but also, in some sense, escapes. The innovation is not in the theological underpinnings that Lewis claims to share with Milton but in the literary devices that make evil in Perelandra seem boring, dead-end, and repetitive, while goodness is the clear source of change and excitement.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 608
Author(s):  
Danielle Burton ◽  
Suzanne Lenhart ◽  
Christina J. Edholm ◽  
Benjamin Levy ◽  
Michael L. Washington ◽  
...  

The 2014–2016 West African outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) was the largest and most deadly to date. Contact tracing, following up those who may have been infected through contact with an infected individual to prevent secondary spread, plays a vital role in controlling such outbreaks. Our aim in this work was to mechanistically represent the contact tracing process to illustrate potential areas of improvement in managing contact tracing efforts. We also explored the role contact tracing played in eventually ending the outbreak. We present a system of ordinary differential equations to model contact tracing in Sierra Leonne during the outbreak. Using data on cumulative cases and deaths, we estimate most of the parameters in our model. We include the novel features of counting the total number of people being traced and tying this directly to the number of tracers doing this work. Our work highlights the importance of incorporating changing behavior into one’s model as needed when indicated by the data and reported trends. Our results show that a larger contact tracing program would have reduced the death toll of the outbreak. Counting the total number of people being traced and including changes in behavior in our model led to better understanding of disease management.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Jewusiak

“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).


2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-177
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała

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.


Author(s):  
Varvara A. Byachkova ◽  

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.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jura Fearnley

<p>This thesis has two components: creative and critical. The creative component is the novel Boden Black. It is a first person narrative, imagined as a memoir, and traces the life of its protagonist, Boden Black, from his childhood in the late 1930s to adulthood in the present day. The plot describes various significant encounters in the narrator’s life: from his introduction to the Mackenzie Basin and the Mount Cook region in the South Island of New Zealand, through to meetings with mountaineers and ‘lost’ family members. Throughout his journey from child to butcher to poet, Boden searches for ways to describe his response to the natural landscape. The critical study is titled With Axe and Pen in the New Zealand Alps. It examines the published writing of overseas and New Zealand mountaineers climbing at Aoraki/Mount Cook between 1882 and 1920. I advance the theory that there are stylistic differences between the writing of overseas and New Zealand mountaineers and that the beginning of a distinct New Zealand mountaineering voice can be traced back to the first accounts written by New Zealand mountaineers attempting to reach the summit of Aoraki/Mount Cook. The first mountaineer to attempt to climb Aoraki/Mount Cook was William Spotswood Green, an Irishman who introduced high alpine climbing to New Zealand in 1882. Early New Zealand mountaineers initially emulated the conventions of British mountaineering literature as exemplified by Green and other famous British mountaineers. These pioneering New Zealand mountaineers attempted to impose the language of the ‘civilised’ European alpine-world on to the ‘uncivilised’ world of the Southern Alps. However, as New Zealand mountaineering became more established at Aoraki/Mount Cook from the 1890s through to 1920, a distinct New Zealand voice developed in mountaineering literature: one that is marked by a sense of connection to place expressed through site-specific, factual observation and an unadorned, sometimes laconic, vernacular writing style.</p>


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