Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth PDF full book. Access full book title Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth by Badri Raina. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Badri Raina
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299106102
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book Here
Book Description
In his works, from Oliver Twist to Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens reveals a continuum of artistic as well as social development over a period of four decades. In this highly original study, Badri Raina relates Dickens' novels thoroughly to one another, illuminating the works by seeing them in terms of the author's changing social outlook, personal attitudes, and aesthetic practice. Raina's book will fascinate readers of Dickens, and will serve social historians as well. The unifying point of Raina's study is Dickens' ambivalence toward respectable Victorian bourgeois society; he criticized the bourgeois myths of unbridled success and achievement through aggressive individualism, yet wished to be a great success himself. Raina argues that Dickens projected this personal ambivalence through the creation of key characters and combinations of characters in his novels, creating also a continual movement toward self-awareness and self-criticism. This personal movement, argues Raina, found expression in a steady improvement in the quality of Dickens' art. Two of the most interesting issues in Dickens studies--that of his development as a novelist and that of his mass appeal in combination with towering aesthetic achievement--are both addressed thoroughly in this lucid and highly readable book. By following common threads of plot and character through the novels, Raina demonstrates how Dickens matured both socially and artistically, until in his last finished novel, Our Mutual Friend, social values that were earlier espoused (for instance, in Oliver Twist) were wholly and willingly rejected. Raina's critical procedure illuminates not just the career of a Victorian novelist, but one who embraces, traverses, and evaluates the social climate of a critical period of the nineteenth century.
Author: Badri Raina
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299106102
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book Here
Book Description
In his works, from Oliver Twist to Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens reveals a continuum of artistic as well as social development over a period of four decades. In this highly original study, Badri Raina relates Dickens' novels thoroughly to one another, illuminating the works by seeing them in terms of the author's changing social outlook, personal attitudes, and aesthetic practice. Raina's book will fascinate readers of Dickens, and will serve social historians as well. The unifying point of Raina's study is Dickens' ambivalence toward respectable Victorian bourgeois society; he criticized the bourgeois myths of unbridled success and achievement through aggressive individualism, yet wished to be a great success himself. Raina argues that Dickens projected this personal ambivalence through the creation of key characters and combinations of characters in his novels, creating also a continual movement toward self-awareness and self-criticism. This personal movement, argues Raina, found expression in a steady improvement in the quality of Dickens' art. Two of the most interesting issues in Dickens studies--that of his development as a novelist and that of his mass appeal in combination with towering aesthetic achievement--are both addressed thoroughly in this lucid and highly readable book. By following common threads of plot and character through the novels, Raina demonstrates how Dickens matured both socially and artistically, until in his last finished novel, Our Mutual Friend, social values that were earlier espoused (for instance, in Oliver Twist) were wholly and willingly rejected. Raina's critical procedure illuminates not just the career of a Victorian novelist, but one who embraces, traverses, and evaluates the social climate of a critical period of the nineteenth century.
Author: D.A. Habibi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 940172010X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this well-researched, comprehensive study of J.S. Mill, Professor Habibi argues that the persistent, dominant theme of Mill's life and work was his passionate belief in human improvement and progress. Several Mill scholars recognize this; however, numerous writers overlook his 'growth ethic', and this has led to misunderstandings about his value system. This study defines and establishes the importance of Mill's growth ethic and clears up misinterpretations surrounding his notions of higher and lower pleasures, positive and negative freedom, the status of children, the legitimacy of authority, and support for British colonialism. Drawing from the entire corpus of Mill's writings, as well as the extensive secondary literature, Habibi has written the most focused, sustained analysis of Mill's grand, leading principle. This book will be useful to college students in philosophy and intellectual history as well as specialists in these fields.
Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Camden House
ISBN: 9781571133175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330
Get Book Here
Book Description
Undoubtedly the best-selling author of his day and well loved by readers in succeeding generations, Charles Dickens was not always a favorite among critics. Celebrated for his novels advocating social reform, for half a century after his death he was ridiculed by those academics who condescended to write about him. Only the faithful band of devotees who called themselves Dickensians kept alive an interest in his work. Then, during the Second World War, he was resurrected by critics, and was soon being hailed as the foremost writer of his age, a literary genius alongside Shakespeare and Milton. More recently, Dickens has again been taken to task by a new breed of literary theorists who fault his chauvinism and imperialist attitudes. Whether he has been adored or despised, however, one thing is certain: no other Victorian novelist has generated more critical commentary. This book traces Dickens's reputation from the earliest reviews through the work of early 21st-century commentators, showing how judgments of Dickens changed with new standards for evaluating fiction. Mazzeno balances attention to prominent critics from the late 19th century through the first three quarters of the 20th with an emphasis on the past three decades, during which literary theory has opened up new ways of reading Dickens. What becomes clear is that, in attempting to provide fresh insight into Dickens's writings, critics often reveal as much about the predilections of their own age as they do about the novelist. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania.
Author: Ian Carter
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719059667
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 362
Get Book Here
Book Description
The 19th-century steam railway epitomized modernity's relentlessly onrushing advance. Ian Carter delves into the cultural impact of the train. Why, for example, did Britain possess no great railway novel? He compares fiction and images by canonical British figures (Turner, Dickens, Arnold Bennett) with selected French and Russian competitors: Tolstoy, Zola, Monet, Manet. He argues that while high cultural work on the British steam railway is thin, British popular culture did not ignore it. Detailed discussions of comic fiction, crime fiction, and cartoons reveal a popular fascination with railways tumbling from vast (and hitherto unexplored) stores of critically overlooked genres.
Author: George Newlin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1573566756
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Get Book Here
Book Description
More than one hundred years after being written, Great Expectations is still one of the most widely studied works of fiction. This casebook of historical documents, collateral readings and essays brings to life both Dickens' masterpiece and the social issues surrounding his work. The interdisciplinary approach offers students insight into the historically significant issues, such as child welfare, that ignited Dickens' creative and moral sensibilities. Newlin has unearthed significant documentation on the dilemma of Victorian women, supplying original social commentary such as Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and John Stuart Mill's 1861 The Subjection of Women. This work also addresses the transportation and deportation of convicts with first-hand accounts of the treatment of prisoners. Original materials describing the significance of class distinctions, with demographic data from 1834, point up the socio-economic gaps that stratified Victorian society. Other primary documents describe the physical settings such as the Marsh Country and the river, and Bow Street in London, that figure prominently in Great Expectations. This collection of sources will help broaden students' understanding of Great Expectations and places it within its historical context. A literary analysis chapter introduces students to the important themes and various writing techniques employed by Dickens. Each subsequent chapter offers original essays and explication of historical documents on significant issues. Each section concludes with thought-provoking study questions, topics for research, and lists of suggested readings. This volume will enhance students' reading of this classic and will facilitate further research for student and teacher alike.
Author: Vanessa Smith
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 1531503608
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
Get Book Here
Book Description
Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms. Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.
Author: István D. Rácz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004311076
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Get Book Here
Book Description
In Philip Larkin’s Poetics István D. Rácz offers a reading of Larkin’s credo that systematically discusses the links between his principles and practice – a discussion notably absent up to now from the many studies of this outstanding post-1945 British poet. While Larkin claimed that his poetry did not need any explication, Rácz argues that a careful reading reveals a coherent poetics. This thoroughgoing discussion of the oeuvre provides ample evidence that Larkin’s poetry of interacting opposites creates a logically organized system based on principles to be found in his poetics.
Author: T. Ferguson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137007982
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Get Book Here
Book Description
Victorian Time examines how literature of the era registers the psychological impact of the onset of a modern, industrialized experience of time as time-saving technologies, such as steam-powered machinery, aimed at making economic life more efficient, signalling the dawn of a new age of accelerated time.
Author: Elizabeth Gargano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135861226
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Get Book Here
Book Description
Reading Victorian Schoolrooms examines the numerous schoolroom scenes in nineteenth-century novels during the fraught era of the Victorian education debates. As Gargano argues, the fiction of mainstream and children’s writers such as Dickens, Brontë, and Carroll reflected widespread Victorian anxieties about the rapid institutionalization of education and the shrinking realm of domestic instruction. As schools increasingly mapped out a schema of time schedules, standardized grades or forms, separate disciplines, and hierarchical architectural spaces, childhood development also came to be seen as regularized and standardized according to clear developmental categories. Yet, Dickens, Brontë, and others did not simply critique or satirize the standardization of school experience. Instead, most portrayed the schoolroom as an unstable site, incorporating both institutional and domestic space. Drawing on the bildungsroman’s traditional celebration of an individualized, experiential education, numerous novels of school life strove to present the novel itself as a form of domestic education, in contrast to the rigors of institutional instruction. By positioning the novel as a form of domestic education currently under attack, these novelists sought to affirm its value as a form of protest within an increasingly institutionalized society. The figure of the child as an emblem of beleaguered innocence thus became central to the Victorian fictive project.
Author: Sara Martín
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527559300
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Get Book Here
Book Description
How are men represented on the printed page, the stage and the screen? What do these representations say about masculinity in the past, the present, and the future? The twelve essays in this volume explore the different ways in which men and masculinity have been represented, from the plays of William Shakespeare to the science fiction of Richard K. Morgan, passing through classic fiction by Emily Brontë and Charles Dickens, and popular favourites by Terry Pratchett and Isaac Asimov, without forgetting the Star Wars saga. Collectively, these essays argue that, although much has been written about men, it has been done from a perspective that does not see masculinity as a specific feature in need of critical appraisal. Men need to be made aware of how they are represented in order to alter the toxic patriarchal models handed down to them and even break the extant binary gender models. For that, it is important that men distinguish patriarchy from masculinity, as is done here, and form anti-patriarchal alliances with each other and with women. This book is, then, an invitation to men’s liberation from patriarchy by raising an awareness of its crippling constraints.
