scholarly journals Plotting Sensation Stories: Affect and Intuition in Short Sensation Fiction

2000 ◽  
pp. 41-58
Author(s):  
Brittany Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Mistaken Identity ◽  
Difficult Time

The British short story is still an understudied form in Victorian studies, and particularly so in studies of sensation fiction. Despite rich and growing scholarship on sensation fiction and its relationship with literary markets and commodity culture, scholars have a had a difficult time shaking off its enduring brand “the novel with a secret,” which has problematically discounted an incredible body of periodical fiction that falls “short” of our expectations about what this kind of fiction looks like. Short periodical works, however, are crucial if we are to understand the nexus of consumerism, mass marketing, social anxiety, and literary production that first peaked in the 1860s, things which have largely come to organise our understanding of what was so sensational about this historical moment in time. This essay compares short and long works from Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, and J.S. Le Fanu to explore how short stories could take up common themes and features of sensation novels (mistaken identity, unchecked passion, family secrets, shocking revelations, etc.) while also considering how formal considerations of length encouraged greater reliance on impressions and feelings to resolve conflicts in the text. These sensation stories so often suggest that deviance is best discerned through the body rather than the mind, and they create a path to pleasurable revelation where trusting one’s gut offers the most effective form of policing. These supposedly “unimportant” periodical works – sensational not only in the way they glutted periodicals with their sheer volume – could in turn promote suspicion and distrust in readers that were capable of damaging real-life bonds and relationships. Although short fiction could provoke anxieties about shifting roles and hierarchies in an increasingly fast-paced, automated British society, the tremendous visibility of the novel effectively shielded them from comparable criticism.

scholarly journals The Rushdie Affair – Politics, Culture and Ethnicity in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album

Politeja ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (31/2)) ◽  
pp. 11-26
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Ossowska-Czader
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Hanif Kureishi ◽  
Second Generation Immigrants ◽  
The Face ◽  
British Muslims

The aim of this paper is to show how politics, culture and ethnicity interweave in the context of the Rushdie Affair in both the real‑life dimension of the historical events taking place in the late 1980s, as well as the literary dimension of the novel by Hanif Kureishi entitled The Black Album. The paper briefly outlines the Rushdie Affair as it unfolded in the British public sphere with particular emphasis placed on the process of consolidation of the Muslim identity among the representatives of different ethnic groups in Great Britain in the political and cultural context of the event which is deemed to be defining from the point of view of British Muslims. The author of the paper presents the profile of Hanif Kureishi, to indicate why he is ideally positioned to look critically at both sides of the conflict. The paper analyses the novel itself insofar as it examines the implications of the Rushdie Affair depicted in The Black Album, the reactions of the second‑generation immigrants of Pakistani descent in the face of the controversy, the influence this event exerted on the process of their searching for identity as well as their integration into British society. Two opposing identity options taken up by the protagonists of The Black Album are analysed by the author of the paper.

scholarly journals Representation Analysis of “Great Expectation” Novel by Charles Dickens

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Luthfiansyah Luthfiansyah ◽  
Mildan Arsdan Fidinillah
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Life Time ◽  
Individual Growth ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Great Expectation ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Queen Victoria

<p>This research examines the novel ‘The Great Expectation’. Researchers are interested in analyzing this novel because it is a picture of real life, especially life in the United Kingdom in the days of Queen Victoria. As a realistic writer, Charles Dickens is through people’s descriptions reflect reality in his life time. This research uses the theory of semiotics which is collaborated with Karl Marx’s theory which reveals class strata. In the science of semiotics, everything, even humans can be made a sign, which can be developed into a myth of life. Seeing from the main actor’s novel, Pip, Everyone still has a lot to learn, such as his kindness, strength, and optimism. Individual growth is the process of growing into a perfect self. Although Pip’s great hopes are disappointing, he finally returns to good moral character, and starts a new life. In addition, this study analyzes the style of the main character Pip which has its own points in interpreting the style of dress. In this novel, researchers want to prove that the style of dress can be a tool to prove the formation of a person’s identity or the identity of a particular group that uses it.</p>

scholarly journals Religiosity in Charles Dickens’ Novel a Christmas Carol Through Genetic Structural Method

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (6S3) ◽  
pp. 2191-2195
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
World View ◽  
Human Life ◽  
British Society ◽  
Structural Method ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English Society ◽  
City Of London

This study aims to examine comprehensively the meaning and the existence of religiosity in Charles Dickens’ Novel A Christmas Carol. It is a qualitative research using a structural genetic approach. The data were collected from the text of the novel and analyzed through a content analysis. The results of this study are as follows: (1) Autonomous structures of the novel such plot, character, setting and theme have a coherent as a whole and are interconnected to describe the problem of religiosity in the novel A Christmas Carol which indicate transformation of religiosity such as religious belief, religious practices and religious values to improve the quality of human life. (2) Social structure of English Society in Industrial Revolution indicates its significance in describing social context of English society in the novel of A Christmas Carol. Such as, the problem of population density, low labor salaries, the high cost of daily living in the City of London, and the degradation of religiosity in the British Society. (3) The author’s world view indicates the need of change of man’s religiosity through his or her affection of social and religious experience to recover the meaning and the application of religiosity in human life especially in the aspect of solidarity. religiosity based on structural genetics, the autonomous structure of the novel A Christmas Carol, the social structure of British society during the Industrial Revolution, and the worldview of the author has a unified whole to prove that there is a homologous relationship between social reality, especially religions of British society during the Industrial Revolution

scholarly journals Spatial Attractions: The Literary Aesthetics of Female Erotic Experience in the Colony

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-269
Author(s):  
Anna Ziajka Stanton
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Albert Camus ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Colonial Literature ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Male Activity ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Colonial Contact

This article examines the aesthetics of representing female sexuality within colonial narratives of the West–East encounter. I consider two literary works whose female characters challenge the gendered metaphors of empire that predominated in a tradition of colonial literature and its postcolonial rewriting: the short story “La femme adultère” by the French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, and the novel Wāḥat al-ghurūb by Egyptian writer Bahāʾ Ṭāhir. In each text, the standard heterosexual troping of imperial conquest as a male activity directed at or against a feminized other is inverted to place a European woman’s sexually aroused body at the center of the drama of colonial contact. Reading these two texts against the grain of the aesthetic formulas that they employ to contemplate the political stakes of cross-cultural intimacies in a colonial setting, I argue that the phenomenological immediacy of how the female protagonist in each is shown to experience the eroticism of colonial space introduces a break in these formulas. The loss of narrative plausibility in each text that follows from these erotic interludes, I propose, ultimately testifies to the irreducibility of the body to either enforcing or disputing the epistemologies of the colonial project.

Love and Vivisection: Wilkie Collins's Experiment in Heart and Science

2010 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Straley
Keyword(s):  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Young Woman ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Human Emotion ◽  
Medical Experiments ◽  
Literary Practices

Jessica Straley, "Love and Vivisection: Wilkie Collins's Experiment in Heart and Science"(pp. 348––373) This essay examines the paradox of Wilkie Collins's antivivisection sensation novel, Heart and Science (1883). in the plot of the cruel vivisector Dr. Benjulia and the helpless young woman who almost becomes his latest experiment, the novel draws from a familiar bounty of antivivisectionist propaganda, but, this essay argues, the novel also reveals Collins's thinking about his own literary genre and the unfavorable comparison many critics were making between vivisection and sensation fiction: medical experiments on live animals often electrified their subjects, and sensation novels likewise shocked their readers. More than simply a metaphor, this connection between scientific and literary practices pointed to a late-Victorian anxiety about physiological sensation and moral reasoning. The focus on the body, critics of both practices maintained, bypassed the authority of the soul and turned human agents into passive receptors incapable of the higher functions of rationality and ethics. In its preface, Heart and Science disavows any relation between its narration and the medical dissection it deplores, and much of the novel progresses without the sensation genre's characteristic shocks. But Collins's text also seeks to recover and to redeem physiology as the basis for human emotion and ethics and, in so doing, to redefine sensation fiction as an aid, rather than an inhibitor, to moral agency.

Sensing Bodies: Negotiating the Body and Identity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-108
Author(s):  
Kylee-Anne Hingston
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
The Moonstone ◽  
Corporeal Body ◽  
Physical Instability

This chapter illustrates how mid-Victorian sensation fiction responds to anxieties exacerbated by nascent Victorian psychology’s attempt to map the self on the corporeal body. Examining the form and focalization of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1862–63) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), this chapter argues that bodies in sensation fiction function both as spectacle, exhibitions of physical instability, and as specimens, case studies on the source of identity. In Aurora Floyd, focalization through an authoritative external perspective provides ‘correct’ interpretations of bodies which have previously been misinterpreted by physiognomy, phrenology, and lineage. In particular, the narrator uses external focalization on disabled villains to manifest how identity appears in bodies and to place eugenic value on those with healthy bodies. By contrast, The Moonstone, lacking authoritative external focalization due to its multiple first-person narrators, uses plot to reveal misinterpretations of disabled bodies, in particular that of Rosanna Spearman. In addition, internally focalized interactions between normate narrators and disabled characters in the novel often cause the narrators to recognize the instability of their own identities and bodies, and thus of normalcy. However, the novel’s overall narrative structure works to control deviance through linearity, which imposes normalcy as a stable, final result.

scholarly journals Irony in Charles Dicken's Oliver Twist

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Ika Kana Trisnawati ◽  
Sarair Sarair ◽  
Maulida Rahmi
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Public ◽  
Poor Laws ◽  
Public Sentiment

This paper describes the types of irony used by Charles Dickens in his notable early work, Oliver Twist, as well as the reasons the irony was chosen. As a figurative language, irony is utilized to express one’s complex feelings without truly saying them. In Oliver Twist, Dickens brought the readers some real social issues wrapped in dark, deep written expressions of irony uttered by the characters of his novel. Undoubtedly, the novel had left an impact to the British society at the time. The irony Dickens displayed here includes verbal, situational, and dramatic irony. His choice of irony made sense as he intended to criticize the English Poor Laws and to touch the public sentiment. He wanted to let the readers go beyond what was literally written and once they discovered what the truth was, they would eventually understand Dickens’ purposes.

scholarly journals Chicago: Where Polygraph Becomes a Science

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23
Keyword(s):  
Blood Pressure ◽  
Word Association ◽  
Real Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Difficult Time ◽  
Claude Bernard ◽  
Detection Of Deception ◽  
People First ◽  
Physical Gestures

Abstract In the 1920’s, earlier work on polygraph instrumentation and procedure in Europe and the United States came together in Chicago where John Reid and Fred Inbau at the Scientific Crime Laboratory applied extensive field observations in real life criminal cases to create the Comparison Question and semi-objective scoring technique, the factors that allowed polygraph to achieve scientific status. While Chicago was not the first place the instrumental detection of deception was attempted, it was the place where the contemporary, comparison question technique was first developed and polygraph became a science. This fortuitous development was the result of the unlikely assemblage of a remarkable group of polygraph pioneers and a ready supply of criminal suspects. It is impossible to pinpoint when people first began noticing the relationship between lying and observable changes in the body. The early Greeks founded the science of physiognomy in which they correlated facial expressions and physical gestures to impute various personality characteristics. The ancient Asians noted the connection between lying and saliva concluding that liars have a difficult time chewing and swallowing rice when being deceptive. Clearly, behavioral detection of deception pre-dates instrumental detection of deception which, it is equally clear, is European in origin. By 1858 Etienne-Jules Marey, the grandfather of cinematography recently feted in Martin Scorsese’s film Hugo, and Claude Bernard, a French physiologist, described how emotions trigger involuntary physiological changes and created a “cardiograph” that recorded blood pressure and pulse changes to stimuli such as nausea and stress (Bunn, 2012). Cesare Lombroso, often credited as the founder of criminology, published the first of five editions of L’uomo delinquente in 1876 in which he postulated that criminals were degenerates or throwbacks to earlier forms of human development. Lombroso later modified his theory of “born criminals” by creating three heretical classes of criminals: habitual, insane and emotional or passionate (Lombroso, 1876). By 1898, Hans Gross, the Austrian jurist credited with starting the field of criminalistics, rejected the notion of “born criminals” and postulated that each crime was a scientific problem that should be resolved by the best of scientific and technical investigative aides (Gross, 2014). In 1906, Carl Jung used a galvanometer and glove blood pressure apparatus with a word association test and concluded that the responses of suspected criminals and mental perverts were the same ( Jung, 1907). In order to appreciate the important polygraph contributions that occurred in Chicago, one needs to first consider what was happening at Harvard University and in Berkeley, California at the beginning of the 2oth Century.

scholarly journals TYPOLOGICAL FEATURES OF THE ARTISTIC EMBODIMENT OF “A GIFTED PERSONALITY” PHENOMENON IN THE NOVEL “DAVID COPPERFIELD” BY CH. DICKENS AND THE SHORT STORY “KHUDOZHNYK” BY T. SHEVCHENKO

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-36
Author(s):  
L. O. Bogachevska
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Main Idea ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Literary Heritage ◽  
Painful Experience ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
Global Art

The article is devoted to the comparative-typological analysis of the autobiographical works “David Copperfield” by Ch. Dickens and “Khudozhnyk” by Taras Shevchenko. Certainly we do not speak about direct influence of Charles Dickens’ work on Taras Shevchenko’s short story, but we can draw parallels and analogies found in the choice of subjects in both writers’ literary works that is why it can be an appropriate material for the typological comparison. Both works typologically demonstrate the presence of the concept of “a gifted personality” and linear biographical principle of composition though chronological framework of Ukrainian and English novels are different, their choice is dependent on the main idea. We can see that “Khudozhnyk” by Taras Shevchenko and “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens through the prism of personal painful experience of the autobiographic character reveal the most actual political issues of contemporary Ukraine and England. Shevchenkos’ literary heritage has undergone the indirect influence by the works of Charles Dickens, but no doubt of the fact of existence of some typological similarities in the compared literary works caused by common socio-political, artistic and aesthetic factors of the global art prospective.

Discourse Analysis of Oliver Twist from the Perspective of Pragmatics

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 626
Author(s):  
Min Lian
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Body ◽  
Speech Communication ◽  
Main Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Conversational Implicature ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Cooperative Principle ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 19Th Century

As a great representative of the British realism literature in the 19th century, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist is set in foggy city London, but reflects the complex social reality in that time. Many domestic scholars studied and analyzed this novel from different perspectives, while most of them paid much attention to the literature translation and analysis of the characters’ image, few studied it from the perspective of pragmatic theories. In view of it, this paper selects plenty of dialogues from the novel and they are classified and analyzed on the basis of Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Leech’s Politeness Principle. After analyzing the characters’ conversational implicature, this paper aims to provide a linguistic reference for the appreciation of characters’ image and social significance of the novel. The paper consists of introduction, main body and conclusion three parts. Introduction part gives a simple introduction of the author Charles Dickens and the novel, then states the previous researches on the subject as well as the research angle, goal and method. The body (consists of two chapters) firstly gives a detailed introduction of the theoretical framework, then analyzes the selected dialogues on the basis of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle respectively. Conclusion part puts forward that people always express their ideas indirectly and implicitly in their speech communication to violate the Cooperative Principle, that is out of consideration of politeness to others, namely observing Politeness Principle.

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