scholarly journals Clusters, key clusters and local textual functions in Dickens

Corpora ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Mahlberg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Functional Groups ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Body Part ◽  
Repeated Sequences ◽  
Stylistic Analysis ◽  
Functional Variation ◽  
As If

The paper argues that corpus linguistics can make useful contributions to the descriptive inventory of literary stylistics. The concept of local textual functions is employed as a descriptive tool for the stylistic analysis of a corpus of texts by Charles Dickens. It is suggested that clusters, i.e. repeated sequences of words, can be interpreted as pointers to local textual functions. The focus is on five-word clusters and five functional groups are identified: Labels, Speech clusters, As If clusters, Body Part clusters and Time and Place clusters. The analysis draws on the identification of key clusters comparing the Dickens corpus with a corpus of nineteenth-century fiction, it identifies links to literary criticism and it gives specific attention to the group of Body Part clusters to illustrate the functional variation of clusters.

Overwhelmed

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice S. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Digital Humanities ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Information Overload ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Literary Practices

What happens to literature during an information revolution? How do readers and writers adapt to proliferating data and texts? These questions appear uniquely urgent today in a world of information overload, big data, and the digital humanities. But as this book shows, these concerns are not new—they also mattered in the nineteenth century, as the rapid expansion of print created new relationships between literature and information. Exploring four key areas—reading, searching, counting, and testing—in which nineteenth-century British and American literary practices engaged developing information technologies, the book delves into a diverse range of writings, from canonical works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charlotte Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Dickens to lesser-known texts such as popular adventure novels, standardized literature tests, antiquarian journals, and early statistical literary criticism. In doing so, it presents a new argument: rather than being at odds, as generations of critics have viewed them, literature and information in the nineteenth century were entangled in surprisingly collaborative ways. The book illuminates today's debates about the digital humanities, the crisis in the humanities, and the future of literature.

Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fariha Shaikh
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Careful Analysis ◽  
Demographic Shift ◽  
Vast Literature ◽  
Spatial Imagination

Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining literary criticism, art history, and cultural geography, to argue that the demographic shift in the nineteenth century to settler colonies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand was also a textual one: a vast literature supported and underpinned this movement of people. Through its five chapters, Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration brings printed emigrants’ letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers, and settler fiction into conversation with narrative painting and novels to explore the generic features of emigration literature: textual mobility, a sense of place and colonial home-making. Authors and artists discussed in this book include, among others, Ford Madox Brown, James Collinson, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Susannah Moodie, Catherine Helen Spence, Catharine Parr Traill and Thomas Webster. The book’s careful analysis of the aesthetics of emigration literature demonstrates the close relationships between textual and demographic mobilities, textual materiality and realism, and the spatial imagination.

Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Collaboration ◽  
Economic Relationship

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.

Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century

2009 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Science And Literature ◽  
Creative Writers ◽  
Humphry Davy ◽  
The Individual ◽  
John Tyndall ◽  
Michael Faraday

‘It has been said by its opponents that science divorces itself from literature; but the statement, like so many others, arises from lack of knowledge.’ John Tyndall, 1874 Although we are used to thinking of science and the humanities as separate disciplines, in the nineteenth century that division was not recognized. As the scientist John Tyndall pointed out, not only were science and literature both striving to better 'man's estate', they shared a common language and cultural heritage. The same subjects occupied the writing of scientists and novelists: the quest for 'origins', the nature of the relation between society and the individual, and what it meant to be human. This anthology brings together a generous selection of scientific and literary material to explore the exchanges and interactions between them. Fed by a common imagination, scientists and creative writers alike used stories, imagery, style, and structure to convey their meaning, and to produce work of enduring power. The anthology includes writing by Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin, Sir Humphry Davy, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Thomas Malthus, Louis Pasteur, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain and many others, and introductions and notes guide the reader through the topic's many strands. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Re charged emblems: Hawthorne and semiotic metamorphics

Semiotica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (235) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Anthony Splendora
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Carrier Wave ◽  
The Rose ◽  
Hester Prynne ◽  
As If

AbstractIlluminating innovatively the dialectic by which “sign” is induced “to signify” requires an analysis of the inferrer-entailed symbolics constituting “signified,” a process particularly observable during relative, purposeful re-signification, particularly at high-visibility sites. Because Nathaniel Hawthorne focused intently his romantic-dramatic oeuvre on cynosural women, because of his affinity for allegorical signification, and especially for his tangibility to feminist themes and axiologies of virtue transcending even the highly reformist nineteenth century, he is here chosen an interpretation-open “carrier wave” for that research. Climactically and consonant thematically, also instructive is Umberto Eco’s unnamed, eponymous “Rose” for being an antiphrastic sign with a truth of its own signifying at least (like Hawthorne’s Puritan-oblique Hester Prynne) divergence from male/hieratic hermeneutics; at most (like Apuleius’s metaphysical Psyche, Hawthorne’s lodestar) ineffable, philosophical Good. As if to the generating premise, Eco wrote in The Name of the Rose, “Without an eye to read them[,] signs produce no concepts”; socially consequential signification-conditioned transformation, in that eye and toward those signifieds, symptomatic both historical and rhetorical, is here assayed.

Is God Really in History?

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Frederick Sontag
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

For some time it seemed as if Christianity itself required us to say that ‘God is in history’. Of course, even to speak of ‘history’ is to reveal a bias for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of thought. But the justification for talking about the Christian God in this way is the doctrine of the incarnation. The centre of the Christian claim is that Jesus is God's representation in history, although we need not go all the way to a full trinitarian interpretation of the relationship between God and Jesus. Thus, the issue is not so much whether God can appear or has appeared within, or entered into, human life as it is a question of what categories we use to represent this. To what degree is God related to the sphere of human events? Whatever our answer, we need periodically to re-examine the way we speak about God to be sure the forms we use have not become misleading.

Rereading Rape in the Critical Canon

differences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-160
Author(s):  
Erin A. Spampinato
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Rape Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Criminal Conduct ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
As If ◽  
Physical Outcomes

This essay identifies what the author terms “adjudicative reading,” a tendency in literary criticism to read novels depicting sexual violence as if in a court of law. Adjudicative reading tracks characters’ motivations and the physical outcomes of their actions as if novels can offer evidence, or lack thereof, of criminal conduct. This legalistic style of criticism not only ignores the fictionality of incidences of rape in novels, but it replicates the prejudices inherent in historical rape law by centering the experiences of the accused character over and against the harm caused to the fictional victim of rape. By contrast, the “capacious” conception of rape proposed here refuses to locate rape in a particular bodily act (as the law does), rejects the yoking of rape’s harms to a particular gender, and understands various forms of violence as equally serious (rather than creating a hierarchy of sexual assault, as current legal conceptions tend to do).

“SAVING BRITISH NATIVES”: FAMILY EMIGRATION AND THE LOGIC OF SETTLER COLONIALISM IN CHARLES DICKENS AND CAROLINE CHISHOLM

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-280
Author(s):  
Terra Walston Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Emotional Identification

As Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley writes inThe Expansion of England (1883), the fear of colonial secession, inspired by that of the United States, haunted Britons’ perception of their “second Empire” throughout the nineteenth century, effectively working against a sense of shared national destiny with the white settlers of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (14–15). One important way Victorian writers combatted the “optimistic fatalism” Seeley observed in his fellow Britons was through an imperial economy of affect, which circulated sentiment and stressed emotional identification between settlers and metropolitan Britons (15). If mid-nineteenth-century British literature can be said to negotiate the tensions of Britain's empire through representations of racial, cultural, and linguistic difference, then narratives of sameness – of British families across the oceans – offer models for cohering the British settler empire. In such a model, techniques designed to reinforce the sentimental bonds of settlers to their families might also reinforce the social, political, and affective connections of the settlers to the metaphorical “mother country.”

scholarly journals A PRESENÇA DE ESCRAVOS EM ALGUNS CONTOS DE MACHADO DE ASSIS

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 160
Author(s):  
Antonio Marcos Sanseverino
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Machado De Assis ◽  
Brazilian Literature ◽  
The Family ◽  
As If

A escravidão é o nexo fundamental para pensar a literatura brasileira do século XIX. Na prosa machadiana, esse nexo histórico foi evidenciado por diferentes críticos (CHALHOUB, 2003, 2012; GLEDSON, 2006; SCHWARZ, 2000). Na leitura dos jornais, desde os anos de 1870, através da leitura de anúncios, vemos o quanto a presença do escravo doméstico era fato naturalizado no cotidiano do Rio de Janeiro (FREYRE, 2012; SCHWARCZ, 1987). Amas, copeiros, cozinheiros, moleques eram anunciados como objeto de venda ou de aluguel. Não apenas o trabalho era vendido ou alugado, mas o próprio trabalhar-escravo. Essa presença cotidiana de escravos é necessária (ou não) para a compreensão dos enredos? Alguns contos machadianos que trazem à primeiro plano do conflito a presença da escravidão: “Mariana” (1871), “O caso da vara” (1899) e “Pai contra mãe” (1906). Entretanto, há um apagamento da história pessoal do escravo enquanto personagem. A expressão “cria da casa” usada para caracterizar Mariana, uma mulata que vive como fosse da família, mostra o quanto a genealogia da personagem se apaga, diluída no pertencimento à casa do dono. Palavras-chave: Machado de Assis. Escravidão. Conto. Cria da casa.ABSTRACTSlavery is the fundamental link to think of nineteenth-century Brazilian literature. In Machado’s prose, this historical nexus was evidenced by different critics (CHALHOUB, 2003, 2012, GLEDSON, 2006, SCHWARZ, 2000). In the reading of the newspapers, from the 1870s, through the reading of advertisements, we see how the presence of the domestic slave was a naturalized fact in the daily life of Rio de Janeiro (FREYRE, 2012; SCHWARCZ, 1987). Mothers, cupbearers, cooks, brats were advertised as objects for sale or rent. Not only was work sold or rented, but the work-slave itself. Is this daily presence of slaves necessary (or not) for the understanding of entanglements? Some Machado tales that bring to the forefront of the conflict the presence of slavery: “Mariana” (1871), “The case of the stick” (1899) and “Father against mother” (1906). However, there is an erasure of the slave’s personal history as a character. The expression “housekeeper” used to characterize Mariana, a mulatta who lives as if she were one of the family, shows how much the character’s genealogy is extinguished, diluted in belonging to the owner’s house.Keywords: Machado de Assis. Slavery. Tale. Of the house.

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