scholarly journals Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield: New Critical Reconsiderations

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Ali Albashir Mohammed Alhaj

<p>The current study aims at reconsidering critically Charles Dickens’s <em>David Copperfield</em>. Charles Dickens is perhaps the greatest—if not the most perfect—of Victorian story-teller whose works have become synonymous with Victorian England. Many of his novels came out in monthly installments and were awaited by his readers eagerly. His popularity lay in his ability to write gripping, sentimental stories filled with memorable characters. On a more serious level, his novels are a detailed account of both the good and bad sides of Victorian life. In the semi-autobiographical <em>David Copperfield</em>, the author paints a graphic picture of the living condition of the urban poor. He also denounces the exploitation of children by adults and the cruel competitive nature of Victorian society.</p><p>To conclude, characters such as Micawber (a portrait based on Dickens’s own father) has passed into folk lore and become household names, used by people who have never read a Dickens novel in their lives. Also, the writer uses too much black paint. However, he wanted to raise kindness and goodness in men’s hearts, and he used tears and laughter to reach his aims. He probably brought a little improvement in some condition, but very often, he failed to do so.</p>

Author(s):  
Fariha Shaikh

Chapter Five takes up this reading and interrogates the ways in emigration literature becomes a trope in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield (1850), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854). This chapter asserts that to ask how central or liminal emigration is to the plot of the novel is to miss the point. What is far more interesting is the ways in which the novels discussed here register the effects of emigration. They draw on the familiar tropes of emigration literature, but at the same time, they imagine a world in which emigration literature connects emigrants and their families and weaves them into the larger global network of the British empire. Thus, collectively, the last two chapters of this book demonstrate the hold that emigration literature had over the cultural imagination. Not only does it produce a stock of common tropes that other genres and media drew on, it also becomes a motif in them, a site of interrogation for the interrogation of texts that produced a widening settler world.


Books Abroad ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 178
Author(s):  
Joseph H. Marshburn ◽  
R. J. Cruikshank

Author(s):  
Fani Hafizah ◽  
Syahron Lubis ◽  
Muhizar Muchtar

The objectives of this project are to describe the intralingual translation techniques used in translating the original novel David Copperfield into a simplified version and to find out the reasons why the translator made a simplified version of the original novel David Copperfield written by Charles Dickens. This study used the descriptive qualitative method. The data were collected by reading the novel, comparing the original and simplified texts of David Copperfield, identifying, classifying, counting, and concluding the results. The theory of Jakobson was used to analyze the data related to intralingual translation techniques. The results of the study showed that from the total data (20 texts from the original novel David Copperfield and 20 texts from the simplified version), the paraphrasing technique was used 6 times and the summarizing technique was used 14 times. Besides, the most dominant intralingual translation technique used by the translator is the summarizing technique. The reasons why the translator used paraphrasing and summarizing techniques in making the intralingual translation of the original novel into a simplified version were also found. Firstly, the original novel consists of 750 pages, which are easier to read by making the summary of the novel into 238 pages using the summarizing technique. Secondly, the original novel consists of many difficult words, which can hinder the comprehension of the reader whereas in the simplified version the novel was paraphrased by using the paraphrasing technique. 


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. p17
Author(s):  
Farhana Haque

Charles Dickens’ Great Expectation actually did reflect the Victorian society and therefore the morality of that era’s people inside of the novel. Since we know that Victorian era basically present some features such as virtue, strength, thrift, manners, cleanliness, honesty and chastity. These are the morals that Victorian people used to hold with high esteem. In this novel Great Expectations, Dickens has created some Victorian characters whom we have seen both in good working way or not at all. But the protagonist named Pip was dynamic and he went through some several changes and dealt with different and significant moral issues. Somehow Pip left behind all the values he was raised with. Because Miss Havisham and Estella have corrupted Pip with rich life. Greed, beauty and arrogance were his ingredient of immoral life. The other characters like Joe and Biddy were static characters throughout the entire novel and became noticeable to be the manifestation of what we call as ideal Victorians. The main heroin of this novel was Estella with whom Pip thought he had some love connection. Hence, Estella has been presented as a good in the sense of potentiality and turned morally bad. Miss Havisham, who was basically a corrupt woman and she engraved the center of the novel. Great Expectations did disclose how was the situation of Victorian society through some important features such as higher class, corrupted judicial system between rural and urban England. Here in this novel, Dickens was concern about the education system in Victorian era where the lower class people get less opportunities of getting proper education. From the beginning to the end of this novel, Dickens explored some significant issues regarding higher and lower class system of Victorian society which did fluctuate from the greatest woeful criminal named Magwitch to the needy people of the swamp country, where Joe and Biddy were the symbol of that regime. After that we can proceed to the middle class family where Pumblechook was the person to represent that regime. Last but not the least Miss Havisham symbolized and bear flag of very rich and sophisticated Victorian woman who has represented the higher class society in the novel Great Expectations. Hence we can say Great Expectations has talked and displayed the class system of Victorian England and the characters of this novel therefore also did uphold the true reflection of Victorian era.


2011 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 378
Author(s):  
Matt W Hayward

AUSTRALIA’S relatively recent discovery by Europeans and rapid loss of traditional knowledge without documentation means the accumulated knowledge of our natural history is scant compared to other continents (e.g., search for publications on the top-order predators of each continent for confirmation). Yet, as Mike Archer highlights in the Foreword to this book, this natural history information is fundamental for us to develop effective conservation strategies. Instead of focusing on accumulating this information, the competitive nature of academia limits the value of publishing simple natural history studies because of the low impact such studies invariably have (see Paul Adam’s chapter), while conservation managers are too busy to publish their natural history research particularly while they receive such little incentive to do so. The Natural History of Sydney offers a valuable remedy to this problem and Dan Lunney and his Royal Zoological Society of NSW editorial team deliver once again in servicing the intellectual needs of Australian zoologists.


Author(s):  
Kathy Lavezzo

England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious “blood libel” was first introduced when a resident accused the city's Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. This book rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England's rejection of “the Jew” and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, the book charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture. It tracks how English writers from Bede to John Milton imagine Jews via buildings—tombs, latrines and especially houses—that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. In the book's epilogue, the chapters advance the inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.


2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 505-524
Author(s):  
Shuli Barzilai

“You mustn't marry more than one person at a time, may you, Peggotty?”“Certainly not,” says Peggotty, with the promptest decision.“But if you marry a person, and the person dies, why then you may marry another person, mayn't you, Peggotty?”“You MAY,” says Peggotty, “if you choose, my dear. That's a matter of opinion.”—David Copperfield(1849–50)THE FIRST TIME I HEARD OF CAPTAIN MURDERERwas in the Jerusalem Theater many years ago when the Welsh actor Emlyn Williams (1905–87) gave a reading of scenes from the works of Charles Dickens. Williams's performance was a recreation of the initiative of Dickens himself who, in the late 1850s, took on yet another activity and persona, that of the itinerant player, and began a series of public tours in which he read from his own works. Of all the pieces Williams performed on that occasion, the story of “a certain Captain Murderer” remains most vividly present to memory not only for its eerie atmosphere and plot but especially for its effect on the audience. I can still recall the collective gasp of horror, as well as the outbursts of laughter, that the story's denouement elicited from a captivated company of listeners.


Author(s):  
Molly Clark Hillard

The time is right to consider anew the ways in which Dickens anticipated, participated in, and critiqued the vast mediascape of Victorian children’s literature. In order to do so, we must continue to challenge our enduring bias that children’s literature does not possess the dialogic register of other genres. Dickens, for one, knew better: though he often tells his readers that children’s literature is a ‘nursery of fancy’ that socializes and humanizes through its ‘bright little books’, he shows a world in which children’s literature is an amorphous network of ‘dark corners’, often governed by ruthless, working-class bodies. Dickens’s fiction and journalism reveal his awareness of children’s literature’s growing currency in economic, cultural, and aesthetic terms. This chapter focuses on the years 1849–54, when Dickens’s child production matched his literary production, and when he was sharply attuned to children’s reading materials.


2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-147
Author(s):  
Syed Jamil Ahmed

If performance rituals are memories in action, what happens to them when a people no longer need to remember – or it is deemed politically undesirable for them to do so? In the following article, Syed Jamil Ahmed explores the annual performance in the Sikkimese monastery of Pemayangtse, in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, of the ritual of Pang Lhabsol (‘Worship of the Witness Deity’), and specifically of the Pangtoed 'Cham, performed on the final, eighth day in homage and gratitude to the mountain. He examines the complex web of political changes over many centuries which have affected the purpose and enactment of the ritual, and finally offers a detailed account of a single day's performance, in 1999, when the ritual was losing some of its dignity and many of its former trappings. Syed Jamil Ahmed is a director and designer based in Bangladesh, where he is Associate Professor at the Department of Theatre and Music in the University of Dhaka. In 2001–2 he was a visiting faculty member at King Alfred's College, Winchester. He wrote on ‘Decoding Myths in the Nepalese Festival of Indra Jatra’ in NTQ74, and on ‘The Ritual of Devol Medua: Problematizing Dharma in the Ethnic Conflicts of Sri Lanka’ in NTQ76. His full-length publications – Acinpakhi Infinity: Indigenous Theatre in Bangladesh (Dhaka University Press, 2000) and In Praise of Niranjan: Islam, Theatre, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, 2001) – catalogue the wide variety of indigenous theatre forms in Bangladesh.


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