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1
Coats, Jerry B. (Jerry Brian). "Charles Dickens and Idiolects of Alienation." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1993. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc277905/.
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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.
2
Crowe, Julian. "Money and character in the novels of Charles Dickens." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15063.
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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.
3
Folléa, Clémence. "Dickens excentrique : persistances du Dickensien." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016USPCC146.
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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 disciplinairesThis 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
4
Ebelthite, Candice Axell. ""The wife of Lucifer" : women and evil in Charles Dickens." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002231.
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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".
5
Morgentaler, Goldie 1950. "When like begets like : Dickens and heredity." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=39968.
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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.
6
Lawrie-Munro, Brian. "The double in Dickens' final completed novels /." Thesis, McGill University, 1997. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=27950.
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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.
7
Trefler, Caroline. "Dickens and food : realist reflections in a puddle of chicken grease." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=24107.
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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.
8
Colledge, Gary. "Revisiting the sublime history : Dickens, Christianity, and 'The life of Our Lord' /." Thesis, St Andrews, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/422.
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9
Teachout, Jeffrey Frank. "The importance of Charles Dickens in Victorian social reform." Diss., Click here for available full-text of this thesis, 2006. http://library.wichita.edu/digitallibrary/etd/2006/t035.pdf.
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Matos, Erika Paula de. "Tempos difíceis na Inglaterra: forma literária e representação social em \'Hard Times\' de Charles Dickens." Universidade de São Paulo, 2007. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8147/tde-08112007-150309/.
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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.
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Santos, Leandra Alves dos [UNESP]. "O romance europeu do século XIX: uma leitura de Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) de Victor Hugo e A tale of two cities (1859) de Charles Dickens." Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP), 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/11449/115583.
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O objetivo deste estudo é analisar a categoria da espacialidade e o procedimento grotesco nos romances Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) de Victor Hugo e A tale of two cities (1859) de Charles Dickens, mostrando como esses procedimentos narrativos auxiliam na projeção das ações das personagens e como produzem efeito de sentido, revelando assim uma das infinitas leituras oferecidas pelas referidas obras. Em Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Victor Hugo revela a miséria humana por meio da marca dos sentimentos opostos que habitam no homem; as contradições desses sentimentos existentes uma ao lado da outra, e não no predomínio de uma sobre a outra. Os espaços da narrativa hugoana são configurações de um novo tempo-espaço marcado pela modernidade da época, e representam uma extensão dos personagens desse romance. Em A tale of two cities (1859), Charles Dickens expressa a miséria que permeia as cidades em crise diante da mesma modernidade, evidenciando que a fome, a ausência de liberdade e de condições de vida adequadas para se viver na urbe moderna transformam o homem em um ser irracional e insensível
This study aims to analyse the spatiality category and the grotesque procedure in the novels Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) written by Victor Hugo and A tale of two cities (1859) written by Charles Dickens, the intention is to show how these narrative procedures help in the projection of the characters actions and how they can produce meaning effect, thereby revealing infinite readings which are offered by the referred works. In Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Victor Hugo reveals the human misery through the opposite feelings which inhabit the human mind; the contradictions of those feelings exist one alongside another and not on the dominance of one over the other. The spaces in Hugo’s narrative are configurations of a new time-space defined by the modernity era, and they represent an extension of the characters in this novel. In A tale of two cities (1859), Charles Dickens expresses the misery that permeates the cities facing crisis in the same modernity, emphasizing that hunger, the lack of freedom and the appropriate living conditions in order to inhabit the modern metropolis transform man into an irrational and insensitive human being
12
Milhan, Trish. "Developing new approaches to Dickens' Great Expectations." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 1993. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd-project/707.
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Zeske, Karen Marie. "Browning and Dickens: Religious Direction in Victorian England." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1991. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500704/.
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Many Nineteenth century writers experienced the withdrawal of God discussed by Miller in The Disappearance of God. Robert Browning and Charles Dickens present two examples of "Fra Lippo Lippi" and Great Expectations model effective alternatives to accepting God's absence. Conversely "Andrea del Sarto" accepts the void the other two heroes shun.
14
Moon, Sangwha. "Dickens in the Context of Victorian Culture: an Interpretation of Three of Dickens's Novels from the Viewpoint of Darwinian Nature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1996. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc279322/.
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The worlds of Dickens's novels and of Darwin's science reveal striking similarity in spite of their involvement in different areas. The similarity comes from the fact that they shared the ethos of Victorian society: laissez-faire capitalism. In The Origin of Species, which was published on 1859, Charles Darwin theorizes that nature has evolved through the rules of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and the struggle for existence. Although his conclusion comes from the scientific evidence that was acquired from his five-year voyage, it is clear that Dawinian nature is reflected in cruel Victorian capitalism. Three novels of Charles Dickens which were published around 1859, Bleak House, Hard Times, and Our Mutual Friend, share Darwinian aspects in their fictional worlds. In Bleak House, the central image, the Court of Chancery as the background of the novel, resembles Darwinian nature which is anti-Platonic in essence. The characters in Hard Times are divided into two groups: the winners and the losers in the arena of survival. The winners survive in Coketown, and the losers disappear from the city. The rules controlling the fates of Coketown people are the same as the rules of Darwinian nature. Our Mutual Friend can be interpreted as a matter of money. In the novel, everything is connected with money, and the relationship among people is predation to get money. Money is the central metaphor of the novel and around the money, the characters kill and are killed like the nature of Darwin in which animals kill each other. When a dominant ideology of a particular period permeates ingredients of the society, nobody can escape the controlling power of the ideology. Darwin and Dickens, although they worked in different areas, give evidence that their works are products of the ethos of Victorian England.
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Cadwallader-Bouron, Delphine. "L'imaginaire de la pathologie : discours médical et écrits romanesques chez Wilkie Collins et Charles Dickens." Thesis, Paris 3, 2009. http://www.theses.fr/2009PA030136.
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Les études qui entreprennent d’évaluer la place de la maladie dans les romans de Dickens et Collins adoptent souvent le point de vue du médecin, montrant comment leurs peintures de la maladie constituent des diagnostics scientifiquement exacts. Or la médecine est d’abord un discours sur la maladie : diagnostiquer les personnages des romanciers reviendrait donc à considérer la grille de lecture médicale comme outil d’analyse valable pour évaluer la maladie dans leur œuvre. Cette thèse se propose d’interroger la pertinence d’une telle grille de lecture, qui semble anachronique [ce discours se construit tout au long du XIXe siècle, il n’est donc pas constitué au moment où les deux romanciers écrivent]. Il s’agit de comprendre comment le discours médical s’est imposé au fil du XIXe siècle : pour dire et écrire la maladie, la médecine s’est inspirée d’autres types de discours, et en premier lieu celui du roman, qu’elle a utilisé pour tenter de prendre place dans les esprits victoriens. Après avoir établi les conditions dans lesquelles est né ce nouveau discours normatif, cette thèse analyse la relation de Dickens et Collins avec ce discours. Conscients que les médecins tentent de passer d’un art à une science positive, les deux romanciers semblent se méfier des nouvelles catégories nosographiques et méthodes cliniques. Nous sommes alors fondés à lire leurs romans non plus seulement comme des documents qui questionnent la pathologie scientifique, mais aussi comme des prismes d’autres imaginaires du corps malade. L’étude de leur œuvre dévoile ainsi les soubassements imaginaires de la nouvelle médecine, mais aussi l’esthétique du morbide propre à chacun des deux auteursStudies concentrating on the value of disease in novels by Collins or Dickens often adopt a medical point of view, showing that the novelists depict illness with the eyes of trained clinicians, offering surprisingly precise case studies and diagnoses. This approach sheds light on some episodes; yet, the “medico-realists” seem to overlook that by viewing literature through a medical prism, they are using the tools and rationale of a constructed discourse. Pathology, which is the science that studies the disease and not the disease itself, was created all long the 19th century. Viewing the novelists’ treatment of disease only through the filter of pathology gives a reductive image of the way they understand morbidity. This research aims at deconstructing the medical discourse, and at showing how, to take up Dickens’s words, “for theories, as for organised beings, there is also a Natural Selection and a Struggle for Life”, which str! uggle scientific medicine has apparently won. Doctors have used other types of discourse to create their own, and in so doing, novels have been a great source of inspiration. After positing that medicine creates a myth of positivism, this study goes on to analyse the way Dickens and Collins considered the rise of this new field. Unlike what medico-realists seem to take for granted, the novelists did not subscribe to the new medical methods and even denied understanding disease according to pathological categories. Their use of diseases unexpectedly unveils the way doctors wrote and imagined disease. Studying Dickens’s and Collins’s ways of conceiving pathology offers insight into the imaginary origins of a burgeoning science
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Bird, Barbara. "The Victorians and role performance : the middle class gentleman in John Halifax, gentleman and Great expectations." Virtual Press, 2001. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1221277.
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This project investigates the social role of gentleman in Victorian England as defined in two Victorian novels, Dinah Maria Mulock's John Halifax, Gentleman and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. Mulock and Dickens promote the middle-class gentleman as a role that prioritizes the fulfillment of duty. Mulock's protagonist, John Halifax, displays this gentlemanliness throughout his social and economic rise. He bridges the upper and lower classes and embodies both a model and a pathway to middleclass gentlemanliness. Dickens's protagonist, Pip, develops this middle-class gentlemanliness as he learns from his own and four other characters' experiences. Dickens separates the inward, duty-focused gentleman and the outward, appearance-focused gentleman in the four characters that influence Pip, thus emphasizing their relationship and the power of social role encoding. These two novels reveal the performances of roles as social constructions that utilize the power of group definitions and the role writers play in shaping those definitions.Department of English
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Tarif, Julie. "Enjeux et défis du style dickensien : Analyse de quatre traductions françaises d'Oliver Twist." Phd thesis, Université d'Angers, 2011. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00979108.
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Il s'agit d'analyser les enjeux du style dans les oeuvres de jeunesse de Charles Dickens, et de dégager les défis linguistiques que pose ce style d'écriture au traducteur, afin d'apprécier dans quelle mesure ils ont été relevés dans les traductions françaises, et par le biais de quelles stratégies. A cet effet, nous examinerons quatre traductions d'Oliver Twist, un roman typique de cette période de l'écriture de Dickens : les deux premières traductions, produites au XIXe siècle, par Emile de La Bédollière et Alfred Gérardin, et les deux dernières, produites au XXe siècle, par Sylvère Monod et Francis Ledoux. Parmi les enjeux et les défis caractéristiques de cette prose, cinq traits de style principaux seront retenus : le greffage du discours spécialisé dans le discours du narrateur, les constructions nominales, les associations lexicales non conventionnelles, la présence de marques d'oralisation dans le discours, et l'ambiguïté. Face à ce texte hérissé de difficultés du fait de la très grande créativité de l'auteur, et de son extrême sensibilité à la langue, les traducteurs n'adoptent pas toujours la même stratégie globale; les défis posés par le texte ne sont pas tous relevés par les traducteurs, ou pas de la même manière. Globalement, deux tendances sont notables, avec une plus grande " fidélité " des traducteurs du XXe siècle au texte de départ, par rapport aux traducteurs du XIXe siècle, même si les différences s'estompent pour certains traits de style. Nous nous interrogerons alors, d'une part, sur ce que cette " infidélité " implique pour le texte d'arrivée, et d'autre part, sur les limites de cette entreprise de " fidélité ".
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Bentley, Colene. "Constituting political interest : community, citizenship, and the British novel, 1832-1867." Thesis, McGill University, 2001. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=36875.
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This dissertation asserts a strong connection between democratic culture and the novel form in the period 1832--1867. As England debated constitutional reform and the extension of the franchise, novelists Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot endeavoured to define human communities on democratic terms. Drawing on work of contemporary political philosopher John Rawls to develop a methodology that considers constitutions and novelistic representations as analogous contexts for reasoning about shared political values and citizenship, this study provides readings of Bleak House, North and South, and Felix Holt that emphasize each novel's contribution to the period's ongoing deliberations about pluralism, justice, and the meaning of membership in democratic life. When read alongside Bentham's work on legislative reform, Bleak House offers a parallel model of social interaction that weighs the values of diversity of thought, security from coercion, and the nature of harmful actions. Felix Holt and North and South are novelistic contributions to defining and contesting the attributes of the new liberal citizen. Through their central characters, as well as in their respective novelistic practices, Eliot and Gaskell highlight the difficulty of uniting autonomous individuals with collective social groups, and this was as much a problem for literary practice in the period as it was for constitutional reform.
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Betts, David John. "Charles Dickens and the idea of madness." Thesis, 1988. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/18918/1/whole_BettsDavidJohn1988_thesis.pdf.
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The concept of madness has intrigued authors from classical Greek
times until the present day. In this, the Victorians in general,
and Dickens in particular, proved to be no exception. While this
thesis is primarily concerned with Dickens's use of madness as
a literary device, the first chapter discusses his ideas in relation
both to literary tradition and to contemporary social and medical
views of insanity. From the literary tradition the Victorians
received several conventional uses of madness, together with an
interest in portraying the unusual or abnormal in human behaviour.
However, not only were these literary conventions modified by new medical and sociological developments relating to insanity, but the novelists' portrayal of the more progressive attitudes was
also influenced by the demands of the novel as a form.
The Idiot figure is perhaps the most potent example of a
traditional symbol of madness. The second chapter examines the
characteristics of this traditional figure and the difficulties
that Dickens experienced in attempting to adapt it to suit the
requirements of the Victorian novel. To circumvent these
difficulties, the role hitherto assigned to the Idiot figure was
increasingly transposed to more ordinary characters who could be
embraced within the social framework of the novel. This transposition
worked with varying degrees of success.
In melodramatic fiction before Dickens, madness had been used
chiefly as a form of punishment. Dickens's interest in the criminal
mind led naturally to an interest in madness and criminality:
chapter III demonstrates the ways in which he modified a conventional
approach. This development involved an increasing exploration of the actual mental state of a criminal; an exploration that evoked
sympathy with the criminal's condition and raised questions about
environmental conditioning and criminal responsibility.
Chapter IV examines the ways in which Dickens began to use
madness as a symptom of a society in which much had gone wrong.
Madness acquired a new symbolic status in novels in which it could
be integrated thematically to reinforce social attacks. This resulted
in tentative explorations of the psychotic states of characters
who could not adjust to the social pressures of Victorian society.
The more Dickens's portrayals of madness reflected serious concerns
in the novels, the less conventional their presentation became.
This increasingly serious use of madness in fiction affected
what had previously been one of its simplest uses - the portrayal
of insanity and eccentricity for comic purposes. Chapter V discusses
Dickens's progression from using madness primarily as comic relief
to his using it to express the fundamental alienation of eccentric
characters from the society in which they live. This sharpened
the question of society's responsibility for the madness of people
within it.
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Campbell, Jane. "Dickens' angels : ambivalence and ambiguity in Dickens' portrayal of feminine virtue." Phd thesis, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/145132.
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Cottier, Penelope Susan. "The Victorian menagerie : the representation of animals and animal imagery in the works of Charles Dickens." Phd thesis, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/151764.
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Senn, Liesel. "Worshipping the household gods : Dickens and domesticity." Thesis, 2015. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/uws:32920.
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In his novels Charles Dickens shows an abiding interest in the family, the child, and educational practices. Families and children are at the centre of almost all his novels, from Oliver Twist to Great Expectations. This thesis argues that Dickens’s focus on the family represents a complicated engagement with the Victorian middle-class ideology of domesticity, an engagement which encompasses both endorsement and critique, and moves from promoting the ideology’s practices as a social and moral foundation to gesturing towards its limits. It further argues that Dickens explores this ideology because at the heart of his writing practice is an understanding of literature as fundamentally participatory, as able and duty-bound to teach its readers and better the society of which it is a part. This thesis begins with a discussion of domesticity and turns to nineteenth-century conduct manuals on parenting, which by attempting to codify and teach domesticity, also expose it. It then examines Dickens’s speeches and journalism in order to formulate a Dickensian literary theory and construct an account of Dickens’s writing practice. This practice is seen to understand literature as having a strong pedagogical and social function, which connects it clearly to nineteenth-century debates about the author as professional and to the sentimental mode in literature. Finally, the thesis interrogates three of Dickens’s novels – Dombey and Son, Bleak House, and Hard Times – in order to explore Dickens’s complex engagement with domesticity. The thesis thus traces the lines of intersection between Dickens’s novels, the family, domestic ideology, and nineteenth-century conceptions of the relationship between literature and society, to argue for a reading of Dickens’s work as profoundly participatory and socially engaged. ACCESS RESTRICTED TO ABSTRACT ONLY
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Brown, Natalie. "Missing Homes: Poe, Brontë, Dickens and Displacement." Thesis, 2021. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-h5bv-yp77.
Full textAbstract:
“Missing Homes” examines three nineteenth-century authors whose experiences of displacement from home, professions and/or class influenced their literary innovations. Displacement is not a new theme to scholars of nineteenth-century literature, who have established it as a defining experience of an era characterized by financial crises, industrial development, migration and empire. However, scholarship on displacement has often focused on how novels train readers to manage the experience of displacement and has depicted the emotions like nostalgia that arise from it as potentially compensatory or reconciliatory to the dynamics of capitalism. “Missing Homes” departs from these narratives to explore authors who found displacement anything but manageable or liberating and whose works illustrate a more unstable spectrum of emotional responses to displacement and its dire long-term consequences. Attention to these authors, I argue, offers a parallel theory of nostalgia in which the unsettled longing for a place to call home registers political discontent with the relationship between the individual and the collective rather than reconciles the individual to displacement.
Departing from critics who have focused primarily on the work performed by metaphors and figures of the domestic, “Missing Homes” engages in biographical readings of the lives, economic circumstances and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens to show how they pursued fantasies of securing homes that could remove them from undesirable personal, economic and political conditions. The failures of these fantasies reveal how conventional narratives describing how individuals might attain security often fail in the face of collective economic conditions in which attaining objects like a home is both economically challenging and often emotionally unfulfilling. Although the variables of their lives were different, I suggest that these authors’ stories of displacement fail to perform therapeutic or intervening work, because the problem of displacement is rooted in material conditions that narrative innovation alone cannot resolve. Instead, readers should derive from these texts and their failures the need for more collective forms of security.
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Stern, Pamela Anne. "Uncertainty of function? Dickens, society and the law." Thesis, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/25399.
Full textAbstract:
The themes of uncertainty, muddle and imprisonment, which are inextricably linked, permeate Charles Dickens’s novels.
In his ‘early’ first five novels, The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge, society is depicted as emerging from the Classical episteme of the eighteenth century into a period of uncertainty that is dominated by values inspired by mercantilism. Social and bureaucratic institutional practices have been outpaced by commercial developments and are shown to be lacking; they are outdated and irrelevant in meeting the needs of a society that is in the process of rejecting its feudal history. Yet, during these uncertain times, these archaic instruments of social control continue to exert a power over the individual in the absence of something more relevant to a commercialised nineteenth-century society. The legislature, the judiciary and the executive all continue to exercise their misguided power over those under their control, capturing these in webs and labyrinths of uncertainty, with the result that Mr Pickwick, Oliver, Nicholas, Little Nell and Barnaby all fall victim to these vagaries, and experience prison in one form or another.
The second, or ‘middle’ group of novels, comprising Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House and Hard Times, reveal something different. Although institutions are still depicted as deeply flawed, Dickens shifts his focus from the inadequacies of social institutions to the flawed individuals who inhabit this defective society; individuals who are required to rid themselves of their flaws in order to achieve authenticity and, thus, enable a regeneration within society to take place.
The ‘final’ novels, Little Dorrit, The Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, seem to suggest that the ambit of commercialisation, with its skewed values, is so all-encompassing that no character is able to escape its clutches. The result is a society and its citizens who are inescapably imprisoned in their respective physical, emotional and moral prisons.
This thesis examines the development and consequences of institutional uncertainty on the individual and on society. It is argued that Dickens follows a Foucauldian trajectory, initially visiting the uncertainties of the times on the bodies of his characters during the
early nineteenth century, attempting to create ‘docile bodies’ of his characters through discipline and punishment of the soul in the middle of the century and, finally, in the second half of the century, revealing an entire society caught up in the morass of uncertainty from which there appears to be no escape.English Studies
D. Litt. et Phil.(English)
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Cameron, Susan Patricia. "Representations of loss in Charles Dickens's Bleak house." Diss., 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10500/989.
Full textAbstract:
The nineteenth century was a time of rapid change, brought about by increasing industrial development and changing patterns of thought and belief. Dickens's attitude to industrialism was ambivalent. He was not averse to progress, but feared that the ills of society would remain overshadowed.
This dissertation explores representations of loss in Bleak House and examines some of the challenges the subject presents. The first chapter concentrates on examples of the wide range of losses with which Dickens deals in the novel to create the cumulative impression of individuals and a nation existing in a state of chaos and decay. Chapter Two focuses on the loss of physical life and the state of death-in-life. Chapter Three deals with the narrative techniques which Dickens uses to represent loss in the novel.English Studies
M.A.
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Schmuhl, Emily J. "The adorned and the adored : issues of sympathy and ownership in Victorian literature." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1957/30024.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis is comprised of two articles that examine sympathy, material culture, and ownership in Victorian literature. In the first article, I explore the figure of the heiress in the Victorian literary tradition, focusing on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. George Eliot marked the heiress figure as unsympathetic, no matter her incarnation: whether the moralist of popular fiction or madwoman of gothic fiction, she is representative of excess and indulgence—ideas that society wanted to condemn in harmony with Georges Batailles's observation that a time of indulgence will be checked by a return to conservative bourgeois ideals. The heiress is made a vessel for these cultural anxieties, representing both the desire for and reaction against material possession within the larger male imperial imaginary landscape. The heiress is a way for the male protagonist to indulge in a decadent coming-of-age narrative before being scalded by his secular desires, abandoning this dream for bourgeois security. I employ the criticism of Batailles, Laura Brown, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, etc., in order to discover how the heiress is objectified and controlled, yet, in the greater narrative structure, finds ways to act outside of the male linguistic system as an agent for change—bringing about the collapse of the fake set and props of the material world. In the second article, I examine Charles Dickens's attempts to control his printed materials and his belief that he could coalesce the expanding literate public into a faithful readership. However, Dickens was troubled by illicit reproductions of his work by the popular presses. In order to look at Dickens's concerns not only over losing control of his product, but also having the emotional essence of his characters and stories compromised, I turn to Bleak House which, critics have established, is in part a treatise against unlicensed copies. I argue that the character of Lady Dedlock serves as a representation of Dickens since she, like him, relies on the popular press in order to maintain her social standing, yet she also imagines that she is above them—though, in reality, much of her "private" life is already in public hands. I focus, specifically, on an unlicensed image of Lady Dedlock (that she is unaware of) that has been reproduced in a collection that anyone can purchase. In the end, Dickens allows his fiction to speak for him, forcing the reader to process the invasive horror of unlicensed copies through the emotion they feel for the actual, authentic woman.Graduation date: 2012
Access restricted to the OSU Community at author's request from June 20, 2012 - June 20, 2014
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Richards, Jo-Anne. "The Imagined Child." Thesis, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10539/19674.
Full textAbstract:
This PhD comprises a work of fiction and a dissertation, both of which explore childhood, children and parenthood.
The Imagined Child, the novel, closely examines the nature of parenthood, the expectations
inherent in the parent-child relationship, and the responsibilities that society imposes on
parents. It explores the strains of guilt and blame that surround all primary relationships:
every child is damaged in some way – through nature and nurture. How they deal with that
damage determines the kinds of adults – and ultimately the kinds of parents – they become.
The dissertation approaches childhood as a literary device. It explores the ways in which four
novelists from different historical periods have characterised and thematised childhood. It
presents ‘childhood’ as a social construct and considers the ways in which childhood and
parenting have changed in recent, Western history. It then focuses on the research into and
literary representations of children in Africa to explore the versions of childhood inherited by
African, and particularly South African, children and how this differs from American or
European models.
Textual analysis was employed to examine the representation of childhood in four texts:
Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), Harper
Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), and Michiel Heyns’s The Children’s Day (2002).
An examination of research and literature shows a very different trajectory for childhood in
Africa than in Europe, and reveals that childhood on the continent has never been consistent,
in life or literature. There is, in other words, no universal “African childhood”.
The literary children of South Africa are examined not only to show how differently
childhood is experienced in diverse segments of society, but also to measure the temperature
of the times.
The differing versions of literary childhood, and their varying treatments, provide a gauge for
the zeitgeist in South African society from the 1990s. The dissertation argues that an
examination of literary children provides insight into the development of a new democracy.
The dissertation and the novel, taken together, suggest that through the real and imagined
children of literature can be gained a sense of ourselves.
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Fanucchi, Sonia. "Realism and ritual in the rhetoric of fiction: anti-theatricality and anti-catholicism in Brontë, Newman and Dickens." Thesis, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10539/20798.
Full textAbstract:
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements of Doctor of Philosophy, Johannesburg, 2016.This thesis is concerned with the meeting point between theatre and religion in the mid-Victorian consciousness, and the paradoxical responses that this engendered particularly in the novels and thought of Dickens, Newman and Charlotte Brontë. It contributes to the still growing body of critical literature that attempts to tease out the complex religious influences on Dickens and Brontë and how this manifests in their fiction. Newman is a religious writer whose fictional treatment of spiritual questions in Callista (1859) is used as a foil to the two novelists. There are two dimensions to this study: on the one hand it is concerned with the broader cultural anti-Catholic mood of the period under consideration and the various ways in which this connects with anti-theatricality. I argue that in the search for a legitimate means of expressing religious sentiments, writers react paradoxically to the latent possibilities of the conventions of religious ceremony, which is felt to be artificial, mystical, transcendent and threatening, inspiring the same contradictory responses as the theatre itself. The second dimension of this study is concerned with the way in which these sentiments manifest themselves stylistically in the novels under consideration: through a close reading of Barnaby Rudge (1841), Pictures From Italy (1846), and Villette (1852), I argue that in the interstices of a wariness of Catholicism and theatricality there is a heightening of language, which takes on a ritual dimension, evoking the paradoxical suggestions of transcendent meaning and artificiality associated with performance. Newman’s Callista (1859) acts as a counterpoint to these novels, enacting a more direct and persuasive argument for the spiritual value of ritual. This throws some light on the realist impulse in the fiction of Brontë and Dickens, which can be thought of as a struggle between a language that seeks to distance and explain, and a language that seeks to perform, involve, and inspire. In my discussion of Barnaby Rudge (1841) I argue that the ritual patterns in the narrative, still hauntingly reminiscent of a religious past, never become fully embodied. This is because the novel is written in a style that could be dubbed “melodramatic” because it both gestures towards transcendent presences and patterns and threatens to make nonsense of the spiritual echoes that it invokes. This sense of a gesture deferred is also present in the travelogue, Pictures from Italy (1846). Here I argue that Dickens struggles to maintain an objective journalistic voice in relation to a sacramental culture that is defined by an intrusive theatricality: he experiences Catholic practices and symbolism as simultaneously vital, chaotic and elusive, impossible to define or to dismiss. In Villette (1852) I suggest that Charlotte Brontë presents a disjuncture between Lucy’s ardour and the commonplace bourgeoisie world that she inhabits. This has the paradoxical effect of revitalising the images of the Catholic religion, which, despite Lucy’s antipathy, achieves a ghostly presence in the novel. In Callista (1859), I suggest that Newman concerns himself with the ritual possibilities and limitations of fiction, poetry and theatre. These dramatic and literary categories invoke and are ultimately subsumed in Christian ritual, which Newman considers the most refined form of language – the point at which detached description gives way to communion and participation. Keywords: Victorian literature, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, John Henry Newman, ritual, religion, realism, theatricality, anti-Catholicism
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Adkins, Lorraine Dalmae. "The self in and through the other : a Bakhtinian approach to Little Dorrit and Middlemarch." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/10621.
Full textAbstract:
The thesis explores how readings of two nineteenth century English novels, Little Dorrit and Middlemarch, can be enhanced by using key elements of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘prosaics’ as a lens through which to examine them. Additionally, the readings are used to provide a platform from which to explore the Bakhtinian notion that language is inextricably connected to selfhood.
The Introduction (1.1.) offers a brief discussion on Bakhtin and, in particular, to his formulation of a ‘prosaics’, offered in opposition to traditional linguistics (or ‘poetics’) which, he feels, is unable adequately to do justice to the social, ethical and ideological complexity of a dialogised heteroglossia, such as is found in the novel. An explanation follows (1.2.) of why the ‘word’ should not be conceived of as static lexical element but rather as an ‘utterance’. Invested with both clear and distinct meanings as well as dialogic overtones, the word forms the basis of all human communication. As the primary means of expressing the ‘self’, it cannot be heard in isolation but is always responsive and dependent upon “another’s reaction, another’s word – the two ‘interpenetrating’ the single utterance, establishing, as a result, its specific locus of meaning” (Danow 22). Likewise, it follows that the ‘self’ cannot exist purely in and for the individual but is irrevocably linked to the ‘other’.
Chapter Two begins with a discussion on the way in which ‘centripetal’ and ‘centrifugal’ forces work simultaneously to shape language (2.1.). It looks at the Bakhtinian idea that language cannot ever have been monologic and unmediated, being instead ever-changing and evolving as a result of numerous influences brought to bear on it such as context, ideology and the discourses of others. The nature of heteroglossia is discussed (with particular reference to ‘dialogized heteroglossia’), as is ‘hybridization’ in which, although a statement appears to emanate from one voice, another parodic or ironic voice will also be evident in refracted form. 2.2. and 2.3 engage in a detailed analysis of selected passages from Books I and II respectively of Little Dorrit with a view to exploring ways in which a Bakhtinian reading is able to provide heightened appreciation of the text. With particular regard to the overtly parodic style of Dickens, I aim to show how Bakhtin’s prosaics, which militates against privileging one ‘voice’
over another, enables the voice of a relatively neglected character, such as Fanny Dorrit, to be adequately heard. Although the emphasis in this chapter is on language, I broach the Bakhtinian notion that both the ‘word’ and the ‘self’ are inscribed through the ‘other’.
In Chapter Three the focus shifts to Middlemarch and to Bakhtin’s notion that selfhood can only be properly located in its dialogic relations to ‘another’. The chapter is offered in four parts, beginning with a brief discussion on some similarities between Bakhtin’s and Eliot’s philosophical thinking, particularly in regard to the ethical nature of the self (3.1.). The next three parts provide detailed thematic analyses of selected passages from Middlemarch. Particular attention is paid to Rosamond Vincy and Tertius Lydgate, whose relationship is explored in some detail. In order adequately to chart their development in the novel I begin by situating each of these characters in his or her various ‘fields of action’, or, as Bakhtin would have it, ‘character zones’. Character zones take into account not only the characters’ direct discourses but also other aspects of their being, including their backgrounds, ideologies and the various attitudes held by both the narrator and other characters towards them (3.2.). The next section (3.3.) explores, in dialogical terms, the rise and fall of Rosamond’s and Lydgate’s difficult alliance and it is suggested that their relationship represents the antithesis of the Bakhtinian notion of ‘finding the self in and through the other’. In the final section (3.4.), Rosamond’s and Lydgate’s possibilities for ‘real becoming’ are canvassed when each enters into dialogic relation with Dorothea Brooke.
The Conclusion (4) offers a brief discussion of some of the ways in which the novel, as a genre, is open-ended. As such, it affords ongoing discussion in which completeness and conclusiveness is replaced with unfinalizability because “the final word has not yet been spoken” in the ongoing search for meaning (EaN 30).Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.
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"The unfolding of self in the mid-nineteenth century English Bildungsroman." 2003. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b5896118.
Full textAbstract:
Cheung Fung-Ling.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-112).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Abstract --- p.i
Acknowledgements --- p.v
Chapter Chapter One --- Introduction --- p.1
Chapter Chapter Two --- Passionate Impulses in Childhood and Adolescence --- p.26
Chapter Chapter Three --- Moral Dilemmas in Love --- p.52
Chapter Chapter Four --- The Ultimate Return --- p.75
Chapter Chapter Five --- Conclusion --- p.99
Notes --- p.104
Bibliography --- p.106