scholarly journals Women’s Ageing as Disease

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Zadrozny
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Medical Narratives ◽  
Similar Vein

In the medical humanities, there has been a growing interest in diagnosing disease in fictional characters, particularly with the idea that characters in Charles Dickens’s novels may be suffering from diseases recognised today. However, an area that deserves greater attention is the representation of women’s ageing as disease in Victorian literature and medical narratives. Even as Victorian doctors were trying to cure age-related illnesses, they continued to employ classical notions of unhealthy female ageing. For all his interest in medical matters, the novelist Charles Dickens wrote about old women in a similar vein. Using close reading to analyse Victorian gerontology alongside Charles Dickens’s novels Dombey and Son (1848) and Great Expectations (1861), this article examines narratives of female ageing as disease. It concludes by pointing to the ways that Victorian gerontology impacts on how we view women’s ageing as ‘diseased’ today.

scholarly journals An Attempt at Applying Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Khalid LAHLOU
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Organic Unity

The present paper is an attempt at approaching Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations from a morphological perspective based upon Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part is concerned with a brief view of the nature of formalism: its background and its process of analysis. The second part is devoted to putting into practice what has been dealt with in the first part. It will be mostly concerned with the question as to whether all the functions of dramatis personae as stated by Propp figure in the object of analysis, Great Expectations. Finally, the paper will draw the conclusion as to whether the aforementioned elements constitute an organic unity.

scholarly journals Epilepsy, Forgetting, and Convalescence in Ondaatje’s Warlight

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Gresil S. Kahambing ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Short Circuit ◽  
Epileptic Seizures ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Health Humanities ◽  
Do So

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (2018), his latest novel to-date, contains nostalgic elements of strangeness and cartography. In this paper, I short-circuit such themes with health under medical humanities, which heeds a Nietzschean counsel of close reading in literature. To do so, I explore the case of Rachel’s illness, namely her epileptic seizures, as an instance that drives her impetus for active forgetting and eventual convalescence. A close hermeneutical reading of the novel can reveal that both of Nietzsche’s ideas on active forgetting and convalescence provide traction in terms of what this paper constructs as Rachel’s pathography or narration of illness. Shifting the focus from the main narrator, Nathaniel, I argue that it is not the novel’s reliance on memory but the subplot events of Nathaniel’s sister and her epilepsy that form a substantial case of medical or health humanities.

scholarly journals Of Grim Witches and Showy Lady-Devils: Wealthy Women in Literature and Film

Text Matters ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 50-65
Author(s):  
Veronika Schuchter
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Women In Literature ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Legal Restrictions ◽  
Societal Expectations ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
Wealthy Women

Imagining super rich women in the real and fictional world has long been a struggle. Those few depictions that do exist are scattered across time periods and literary genres, reflecting the legal restrictions that, at different points in time, would not allow women to accumulate assets independent of the patriarchal forces in their lives. The scarcity of extremely wealthy women in literature and film is confirmed by Forbes magazine’s list of the fifteen richest fictional characters that features forty different fictional men and only nine women, with never more than two female characters nominated in a single year. This article explores the depiction of three exceptionally wealthy women: Cruella de Vil in The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) by Dodie Smith, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens, and the figure of the stepmother in various adaptations of “Cinderella.” I demonstrate how the protagonists’ wealth allows them to manipulate others and disconnect themselves from patriarchal and societal expectations. Further, I argue that these affluent antagonists are “rogued” by their respective narratives, highlighting their perceived anti-feminine and emasculating behaviour resulting in a mode of narration that greedily gazes at and shames their appearances and supposed unattractiveness. While this genealogy of rich rogues reiterates the narrow scope of imagining wealthy women on the page and on the screen, there are moments in the narratives that disrupt stereotypical depictions of these wealthy characters who defy the labels imposed on them.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
The Media

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.

Serialization and Victorian Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan David Bernstein ◽  
Julia McCord Chavez
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Active Reading ◽  
History Of ◽  
Improved Technology ◽  
The 19Th Century

Serialization, a publication format that came to dominate the Victorian literary marketplace following its deft adoption by marketing master Charles Dickens in the 1830s, is a transcendent form. It moves across not only print formats and their temporal cycles of distribution (daily or weekly installments in periodicals, monthly part-issue numbers, volumes), but also historical time and place. The number and varieties of serial publications multiplied during the middle of the 19th century due to the improved technology of printing, the cheaper cost of paper production, and the abolition of taxes on advertising. Moreover, serialization continues to be a staple in popular culture today; the long-form serial on television may be the most obvious descendent of the Victorian novel issued in parts. The history of the Victorian serial in its many forms spans from its roots in the 18th century to its reconfiguration following the advent of radio, television, and the internet. The most prevalent accounts of the serial have focused on the economics of the literary marketplace and print culture including the sharp increase of periodicals at midcentury. In recent years, scholars have come to understand the serial as a reflection of historically specific concepts of time and space, as an important location of experimentation and collaboration, as a book technology that fosters critical thinking and active reading, and as an object of transatlantic, even global, circulation. New studies of serial forms include digital approaches to analysis, web-based resources that facilitate serial reading, and comparative work on 21st-century media that underscores the continued role of serialization to create imagined communities within cultural life.

Social and Moral Vision in Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72
Author(s):  
Nicolaus C. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Episodic Nature ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Specific Influence

With the exception of Sir Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper, no two British and American writers of the nineteenth century are compared as frequently as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Yet, despite the far greater literary importance of Dickens and Twain, we are without a thorough understanding of the parallels in their work. Why does this problem exist? There are two basic reasons. The first lies in the thinness of Twain's comments on Dickens. If, to a modern critic like Ellen Moers, it is clear that Twain resembled Dickens in ‘the theatricality of his prose, the conception of the public as an audience of responsive listeners rather than as solitary readers, the episodic nature of his fiction cut to an oral rather than a literary measure’, to Twain himself it seemed unnecessary to make such an acknowledgement. In his fiction, as well as in his correspondence, Dickens's specific influence is at best marginal, and in his Autobiography he relegates Dickens to the position of the artist-innovator of the public reading.

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