DICKENS QUARTERLY最新文献

Abstract:

This article has three intentions. It starts with the name "Mudfog" as this appears in Dickens, and as the combination of mud and fog – why these? – runs throughout Dickens's prose and his settings, and his interests. It gives particular attention here to Bleak House and Little Dorrit and Great Expectations. Second, it is interested in thinking of mud and fog not as "symbols," but as modes of thinking (definable as allegorical), and here it pursues Dickens's reading of Shakespeare by looking at the uses of mud and fog as they accumulate from Shakespeare's plays. It attempts to read Dickens not as merely drawing on Shakespeare but as enabling a reading of Shakespeare in turn – here discussion of Hamlet becomes crucial for a reading of Bleak House.

Abstract:

Charles Dickens's involvement in the 9 June 1865 Staplehurst Rail Crash was a traumatic event that resonated with the author for the remainder of his life (which ended five years to the day of the accident). This article merges examinations of Dickens's symptoms of what is now termed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the Staplehurst Rail Crash, auxiliary personal events that may have contributed to his PTSD, and his position as a public figure who controlled his image and expressed himself through his fiction and nonfiction works. Combining these three means of understanding Dickens's PTSD provides further insight into how Dickens attempted to use his authorial identity and writing to control the trauma that haunted him.

Abstract:

Most modern biographies of Dickens refer to his first major assignment for the Morning Chronicle: a trip to Edinburgh to report on a Festival in honor of Lord Grey. The visit has become celebrated by the inclusion, in the resulting newspaper copy, of a 238-word passage which, it has been remarked, "would not have been out of place in one of Boz's Monthly tales" (Slater 43). The present paper considers the fiercely bipartisan political atmosphere at the time, its expression in the contemporary press, and the impact on it of the famous passage. It is suggested that a jokey contemporary comment on the passage represents the earliest recovered quasi-personification of Dickens's authorial presence.

Abstract:

This article seeks to revise the orthodox opinćions about Dickens as a "superficial" novelist who is unable to delve into the souls of his characters and depict their interiority. Since the introspective elements in Dickens are worthy of more attention than they have received, I critically dissect two passages in which Dickens dramatizes the mental operations of two criminals (Sikes and Fagin) at a moment of crisis in Oliver Twist. As I argue, the vigour and intensity of the novelist's portrayal of these characters' inwardness and mental activity draw heavily on eye imagery, its symbolic implications, and metaphors of seeing, which focuses all textual eyes together with the reader's eyes on the two malefactors. The internal focalizations of Sikes and Fagin deserve a particular critical interest because of their significant impact on the cultural afterlives of the novel, which this essay also discusses.

Abstract:

In this article, I analyze the progression of Louisa Gradgrind's imaginative and emotional interior life in Charles Dickens's Hard Times. I integrate Gaston Bachelard's theory of the intrinsic relationship between imagination and architectural spaces in The Poetics of Space (1958) with Cassandra Falke's theoretical approach to learning empathy through reading literature in The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016) in order to create a critical framework. This framework then illustrates Dickens's use of domestic spaces to guide his readers experientially through Louisa's interior healing and development throughout the novel. I argue that Dickens desires his readers to believe by the end of Louisa's story that this inner wholeness is also possible and achievable for them through reading literature.

Abstract:

This article explores the function and significance of "extra-illustrations" by discussing the steel-engraved plates of two episodes in Barnaby Rudge by Thomas Sibson (1817–44) in relation to Hablot Knight Browne's (1815–82) wood-engravings of the same scenes. While Browne's designs are carefully integrated into the text by meticulous placement, Sibson's plates were intended to stand alone in a frame or collector's portfolio. Browne take us deeper into the story by intensifying the drama of the moment, whereas Sibson often makes allusions that take the viewer beyond the narrative. The comparison between Sibson's and Browne's methods reveals a range of issues pertaining to British illustration culture and practices of the 1840s, showing particularly how the differences in form, mode, timing of issue, the presence or absence of captions, and the circumstances of display affected reception.