Academic literature on the topic 'Dickens, charles, 1812-1870, juvenile literature'

In England, realism was formed very quickly, because it appeared immediately after the Enlightenment, and its formation occurred almost simultaneously with the development of Romanticism, which did not hinder the success of the new literary movement. The peculiarity of English literature is that in it romanticism and realism coexisted and enriched each other. Examples include the works of two writers, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Bronte. However, the discovery and confirmation of realism in English literature is primarily associated with the legacy of Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863). The works of Charles Dickens differ not only in the strengthening of the real social moment, but also in the previous realist literature. Dickens has a profoundly negative effect on bourgeois reality. Key words: England, realism, literary trend, bourgeois society, utopia, unjust life, artistic description

The English novelist Charles John Hoffman Dickens (1812-1870) is well known for scholars and students of English literature. His name is always accompanied to some( classics) in the history of the English novel such as: ( Oliver Twist( 1839), David Copperfield (1850), Hard Times ( 1854 ), The Tale of Two Cities ( 1859 )Great Expectations (1860) and other novels. He is one of the most professional novelists of the Victorian age; rather, he is regarded by many critics as the father of the realistic trend and the greatest novelist of his age. In his fiction, Dickens created some of the world's best-known fictional characters that became prototypes not only in English but in world literature as well. Oliver Twist presents a unique depiction of evil and good characters in English society through a highly serious and powerful conflict full of dramatic events like a traditional tragedy, but the line of action turns to satisfaction and happy end just like a work of comedy. This paper claims that the novelist employs the dramatic genre: Tragi-comedy into a novel by mixing elements of both tragedy and comedy. Although the action in the novel is highly tragic and full of miseries and evil plots, the novel ends happily.

A part of Charles Dickens's genius with character is his deftness at creating an appropriate idiolect for each character. Through their discourse, characters reveal not only themselves, but also Dickens's comment on social features that shape their communication style. Three specific idiolects are discussed in this study. First, Dickens demonstrates the pressures that an occupation exerts on Alfred Jingle from Pickwick Papers. Second, Mr. Gradgrind from Hard Times is robbed of his ability to communicate as Dickens highlights the errors of Utilitarianism. Finally, four characters from three novels demonstrate together the principle that social institutions can silence their defenseless constituents. Linguistic evaluation of speech habits illuminates Dickens's message that social structures can injure individuals. In addition, this study reveals the consistent and intuitive narrative art of Dickens.

This thesis discusses the relationship between money and character in the novels of Charles Dickens, concentrating mainly on the later novels, from Dombey & Son onwards. Money is extremely important in Dickens's social criticism, and he is always conscious of money-related motives in his conception of character. However, despite its importance and omnipresence, money ought not to be elevated into the key explanatory principle in Dickens's thought. Dickens has been valued for different qualities over the years. Many who value him as an entertainer with a powerful poetic imagination tend to undervalue his social criticism and moralising, and to treat those aspects as non-essential or as belonging to a different side of his life and work. On the other hand those who value him as social and moral critic have combined this with exaggerated claims of thematic coherence. This thesis suggests that we can dispense with such claims while still regarding Dickens's novels as serious contributions to the moral and social debates of his day. A close consideration will be given to most of the later novels, with the intention of placing the money themes alongside other themes, so as to emphasise the many-sidedness of Dickens's social and moral criticism. Other themes explored in the thesis include marriage and the home, and hypocrisy and self-deception. The thesis seeks to do justice to Dickens's thorough-going ambivalence towards money, and to his capacity for revisiting characters and themes from one work to another. The bias of the thesis is towards the personal and individual, but money is inevitably a social topic. Much consideration is therefore given to Dickens's fictional and non- fictional responses to contemporary social problems and attitudes, and also to material not written by Dickens but published by him in Household Words and All the Year Round.

Cette thèse examine des trajectoires imaginaires décrites dans l’œuvre de Charles Dickens et à partir d’elle. On y étudie le texte et les réincarnations de Great Expectations (1860-61), Oliver Twist (1837-39) puis The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), trois romans qui, depuis l’ère victorienne, pénètrent l’imaginaire collectif et alimentent des discours divers, toujours influencés par leurs conditions de production. Ainsi, cette thèse pratique des microanalyses de ses sources primaires tout en prêtant attention au contexte de chaque œuvre. Son corpus comprend des adaptations filmiques mais aussi des reprises plus indirectes, telles que des réécritures, séries télévisées ou jeux vidéo faisant apparaître des éléments identifiables comme « dickensiens ». Cet adjectif qualifie des objets imaginaires et des phénomènes culturels dont on s’attache ici à préciser la nature. En particulier, le dickensien et ses persistances sont étudiées au prisme de l’excentricité, un terme souvent utilisé pour évoquer la qualité truculente et insolite des écrits de Dickens. Mais ici, la définition de cette notion est approfondie : l’excentrique, toujours situé entre un centre et ses marges, sert à penser les ambivalences du dickensien. Au gré des contextes socio-culturels et esthétiques dans lesquels il s’incarne, l’imaginaire créé par Dickens nourrit des discours tantôt normatifs et maîtrisables, tantôt subversifs et déroutants. La cartographie chaotique dressée dans ce travail aboutit à une réflexion méthodologique : les persistances du dickensien forment des trajectoires discontinues et imprévisibles, qui contrarient les classements bibliographiques, périodisations et barrières disciplinaires
This thesis looks at the text and afterlives of Great Expectations (1860-61), Oliver Twist (1837-39) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), by Charles Dickens. Ever since the Victorian era, these three novels have penetrated our collective imagination and have fed into various kinds of discourses, which are always determined by their conditions of production and reception. Thus, this thesis both performs microanalyses of its primary sources and explores the context in which each work was published. Its corpus includes filmic adaptations as well as more indirect reincarnations, such as rewritings, TV series and videogames featuring elements identifiable as ‘Dickensian’. The latter adjective points to a variety of fictional objects and cultural processes, which are gradually circumscribed throughout this thesis. In particular, the Dickensian and its afterlives are defined in connection with the ‘eccentric’, a term often used to conjure up the colourful and sometimes queer quality of Dickens’s texts. Here, however, a broader definition of this notion is adopted: the eccentric, which always stands halfway between a centre and its margins, is used to examine the many ambiguities of the Dickensian. For, as they move into new aesthetic and socio-cultural contexts, the fictions created by Dickens feed into discourses which can be normative and/or subversive, stereotyped and/or disturbing. My cartography of Dickensian afterlives gradually appears as chaotic, which eventually leads me to reconsider some of my methodological assumptions: Dickens’s fictions move in irregular and unpredictable ways, which often upset bibliographical, periodical and disciplinary boundaries

This thesis examines Dickens's presentation of evil women. In the course of my reading I discovered that most of the evil women in his novels are mothers, or mother-figures, a finding which altered the nature of my interpretation and led to closer examination of these characters, rather than the prostitutes and criminals who may have been viewed negatively by Nineteenth century society and thereby condemned as evil. Among the many unsympathetically portrayed mothers and mother-figures in Dickens's works, the three that are most interesting are Lady Dedlock, Miss Havisham, and Mrs Skewton. Madame Defarge initiates the discussion, however, as a seminal figure among the many evil women in the novels. Psychoanalytical and socio-historic readings grounded in Nineteenth century conceptions of womanhood provide background material for this thesis. Though useful and informative, however, these areas of study are not sufficient in themselves. The theory that shapes the arguments of this thesis is defined by Steven Cohan, who argues strongly that the demand for psychological coherence as a requisite of character obscures the imaginative power of character as textual construct, and who both refutes and develops character theory as it is argued by Baruch Hochman. Cohan's theory is also finally closer to that outlined by Thomas Docherty, who provides a complex reading of character as ultimately "unknowable".

This dissertation attempts to trace hereditary motifs in the novels of Charles Dickens and to relate these motifs to broader concerns--specifically Dickens's depiction of the formation of the self, his understanding of history and of the role of time Towards this end, I offer an historical overview of scientific and popular thinking on heredity, and suggest how some of these notions were translated into Dickens's fiction. The discussion of hereditary themes in the novels falls into two broad categories--the private and the public.
In the first of these, I argue that Dickens tended to define positive moral qualities, such as goodness, as hereditable. At the same time, he was reluctant to portray negative characteristics, such as criminality or insanity as being amenable to hereditary transmission. This assumption of a moral basis to heredity had ramifications for Dickens's understanding of human nature which, in turn spill over into his depiction of the broader public issues associated with heredity--its relationship to class, to race, and to history.
The very last section of the thesis focuses on the Darwinian revolution. There I argue that Dickens's attitude towards the importance of hereditary endowment changed after the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859. I suggest that Darwin's book prompted Dickens to rethink his earlier deterministic approach to the problem of human identity. After 1859, Dickens jettisons heredity entirely as a factor in the formation of the self and replaces it with environment and experience. The last novels displace the Dickensian metaphors of hidden kinship and universal connection--both of which are related to heredity--and put in their place, the thematics of dispersal and disintegration.

This thesis is an examination of the double motif used by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. There is a subtle shift that takes place in these last completed works, from a double motif which is used to prescribe individual behaviour along the lines of domestic or Christian ideology, to one which examines the social and psychological consequences of the individual's submission to such ideological imperatives. In fine, Dickens begins to distance himself from the stock, physical double he had inherited, turning instead to a double that finds its causes and ramifications firmly located in both the social and psychological spheres. This increasing complexity of the double motif is indicative of Dickens' gradually more sophisticated, less stereotypical view of the relationship between the individual and society than that suggested by his famous caricatures or his previous works.

Food has a near-ubiquitous role in the fiction of Charles Dickens. From the action that does and does not take place, to the appearance and essence of the characters, and to the language and style in which they were written, virtually every aspect of Dickens's novels and short stories is, to some extent and at one time or another, connected with food. This thesis explores the nature and implications of food in Dickens and, in addition to its introduction and conclusion, it has been divided into three chapters: (a) Language, Style, and Subject/theme; (b) Plot and Setting; and (c) Characterization. As well, the parallel between food's omni-presence in Dickens's fiction and its centrality in the so-called 'real world' has meant that the literary concept 'realism' is a recurrent concern.

Charles Dickens é um autor cujos méritos literários são, muitas vezes, obscurecidos por sua enorme popularidade, sendo seus livros relegados por muitos à categoria de mero entretenimento. O propósito deste trabalho é analisar na forma do romance como - apesar de temas e estilo que se apresentam como populares - o texto de Hard Times pode revelar um interessante e profundo diálogo entre literatura e sociedade. Sentimentalismo e melodrama são estudados como formas tipicamente dickensianas de representação dos conflitos e transformações sociais que afetaram o século XIX.
Charles Dickens has sometimes had his literary qualities darkened by his enormous popularity, and his books have been considered by many critics as nothing but entertainment. The objective of this work is to analyse how the form of the novel - in spite of its popular style and theme- promotes in Hard Times an interesting and profound dialogue between literature and society. Sentimentalism and melodrama are studied as typically Dickensian forms of representation of social changes and conflicts in the 19th Century.