The Scriptures of Charles Dickens: Novels of Ideology, Novels of the SelfRoutledge, 5 de dez. de 2016 - 328 páginas This study focuses on Dickens's response to questions of identity, conduct, and social organization that emerged in an era of major cultural unsettlement and change, not least with the decline of religious certainty and the rise of materialism. An analysis of A Christmas Carol as a paradigm of his concerns and strategies in these fields is followed by close readings of novels from different stages of his career, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. These, and other works by Dickens, are seen to reflect ideologies currently at work in his society but also, more importantly, to participate in the construction of needful value systems and codes for regulating behaviour. Liberal humanism and middle-class hegemony feature largely in this process of culture formation, where Dickens played a crucial role in formulating and promulgating such salient guiding principles as those of sympathy, marriage and the family, economic responsibility, and hierarchy within and between groups. His treatment of the self is on one level driven by this project in shaping and stabilizing attitudes among a confederacy of readers, in that it offers positive models of development, of how to function and fit in; yet on another, especially in his sustained imaginative preoccupation with the figure of the outsider or misfit, this is one pre-eminent area where his writing transcends purposes of enculturation and paradoxically challenges its own ideological positions. His female characters in particular, as well as more obviously his anti-heroes, criminals, and other dissidents, are shown to question and subvert the moulds in which they are formally cast. The novels are confirmed not only as great creative achievements, an aspect this book consistently salutes, nor simply as a primary site of the evolving Victorian dispensation and revolution of ideas, but as a territory that predicts, engages, and illuminates our own complex modernity. Reference is made throughout the volume to other contemporary writings, including sociological, philosophic, and medical discourse, to recent cognate theory, and to traditions, like that of Puritan spiritual autobiography, which Dickens adapted to new ends. |
Conteúdo
Hegemony and the Transgressive Imagination | |
Selving and Social Modelling | |
Pip Pirrips Gospel for Modern | |
Retrospective and Reform | |
Outras edições - Ver todos
The Scriptures of Charles Dickens: Novels of Ideology, Novels of the Self Vincent Newey Prévia não disponível - 2019 |
Termos e frases comuns
Agnes become Bella better Biddy Bob Cratchit Boffin Bradley Headstone Brownlow Bunyan chapter character Charles Dickens child Christmas Carol course Cratchit culture David Copperfield Dickens's Dickensian Dora episode Ernest de Selincourt Estella Eugene example Expectations eyes Fagin feelings Fiction figure forge Freud gentleman hand happy Harmondsworth Harthouse Headstone heart human ideology Joe's John living Lizzie London looking Magwitch Maylie Micawber Michael Slater middle-class mind Miss Havisham moral Murdstone Mutual Friend Nancy narrative nature never novel Oliver Twist Oliver's once Orlick Oxford Penguin Books Pilgrim's Progress Pip's psychological reader relationship repr Riderhood Satis House scene Scrooge Scrooge's seems sense sexual Sikes social society spirit Stave Steerforth story symbolic theme things thought Tiny Tim truth turn University Press Uriah Heep Victorian Wegg Wemmick woman words Wordsworth Wrayburn writing