Charles Dickens: The Woolf Afterlife

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-310
Author(s):  
Michael Hollington
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Jane Austen ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fyodor Dostoevsky ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Familiar Essay ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Critical Writings

This essay begins with a survey of attitudes towards Charles Dickens in the extended Stephen family, as these were inherited by the modernist writer Virginia Woolf. On the one hand, there is the strongly negative view of her Uncle Fitzy (Sir James Fitzjames Stephen), and the lukewarm, rather condescending opinion of her father Leslie Stephen. On the other, there is the legacy of enthusiastic attention and appropriation from William Makepeace Thackeray's two daughters – her aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie and (posthumously) Min, Leslie Stephen's first wife. In the second section I survey Woolf's critical writings on Dickens, adding a glance at the opinions of her husband Leonard. In both, there is an evolution towards greater attention and enthusiasm. Besides Woolf's familiar essay on David Copperfield (1849–50), I give prominence to lesser-known writings, in particular to her laudatory assessment and analysis of Bleak House (1852–3). The third and final part concerns signs of the influence of Dickens in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). The earlier, satiric part of the novel shows the impact both of Jane Austen and Dickens as ironists and humourists. During the tragic conclusion, influenced by a reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jane Austen drops out, but Dickens is retained.

scholarly journals Encountering Charles Dickens: The Lawyer’s Muse

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-516
Author(s):  
Michael P. Malloy
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Professional Responsibility ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Extended Study ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Practical Impact

This article explores the themes of the practical impact of law in society, the life of the law, and the character of the lawyer (in both senses of the term), as reflected in the works of Charles Dickens. I argue that, in creating memorable scenes and images of the life of the law, Charles Dickens is indeed the lawyer’s muse. Dickens – who had worked as a junior clerk in Gray’s Inn and a court reporter early in his career – outpaces other well-known writers of “legal thrillers” when it comes to assimilating the life of the law into his literary works. The centrepiece in this regard is an extended study and analysis of Bleak House. The novel is shaped throughout by a challenged and long-running estate case in Chancery Court, and it is largely about the impact of controversy on the many lawyers involved in the case. It has all the earmarks of a true “law and literature” text - a terrible running joke about chancery practice, serious professional responsibility issues, and a murdered lawyer. Keywords: Charles Dickens; Law and Literature; the Life of the Law.

A STUDY ON HOW LONG AND SHORT SENTENCES SHOW THE STORY’S PACING IN ANTHONY HOROWITZ’S RAVEN’S GATE

JURNAL SPHOTA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-31
Author(s):  
I Wayan Sidha Karya ◽  
Ida Bagus Adhika Mahardika
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Harry Potter ◽  
Sentence Length ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Story Line ◽  
General Audience ◽  
Grammatical Form ◽  
Average Sentence ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact

Long and short sentences affect the reader’s pace of reading story since they have to farce the complexity of the sentences and words used in it. In this study the impact of the use of long and short sentences on the pace of the story as implemented by Anthony Horowitz, a novelist, in his novel Raven’s Gate, is being explored. Especially the researchers looked at what types of long and short sentences were being used in the novel and how they were building up the story line and their effect on the pace of the story. A sentence with the length of up-to fourteen (14) words is considered to be short and the one over 14 words is considered to be long in spite its grammatical form, whether it is simple or complex. The criteria are based on empirical study as mentioned by Casi Newell in the AJE (American Journal Experts) retrieved from https://www.aje.com/en/arc/editing-tip-sentence-length/, that “the average sentence length in scientific manuscripts is 12-17 words,” with JK Rowling—the writer of Harry Potter—who can be considered to be representative of a modern English writer with a general audience, having the average of 12 words. For convenience we take the liberty of taking 14 words for the longest sort sentences and those which have 15 or more words are considered to be long sentences

Of Snake Dances, Overseas Brides, and Miss World Pageants

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amita Nijhawan
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Pride And Prejudice ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
Class Hierarchy ◽  
Economic Practices ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The One ◽  
Gurinder Chadha

InPride and Prejudice, author Jane Austen shows us nineteenth-century British class hierarchy. On one level, this hierarchy is established through wealth and means, but on another, it is through differences between characters created by breeding and manners. In the book, conversations and habits are signs of these differences, and therefore, signs of worth. InBride and Prejudice: A Bollywood Musical, using the basic narrative of the novel, director Gurinder Chadha gives us a colorful picture of global-political economics. Differences between countries like India, Britain, and the United States are established through signs of wealth and consumerism, but also through dance and body movements. A Bollywood staple of song-and-dance is deployed here as a marker of difference between India and others, and between an old India with stifling economic practices and a new one that welcomes its tourists, investors, and bridegrooms with open arms and legs. While on the one hand, Chadha seems to consciously point out the problems of global economic inequality and imperialism, in other ways, she seems complicit in the plot to attract India's others to get a little taste of India, by using female bodies to construct a modern, seductive picture of the country.

Threads of Transmission in Muḥammad Barrāda’s Luʿbat al-nisyān

2019 ◽  
pp. 141-158
Author(s):  
Hoda El Shakry
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Theological Discourse ◽  
Narrative Time ◽  
The One ◽  
Critical Writings

Literary critic and novelist Muḥammad Barrāda’s (b.1938) experimental 1987 Luʿbat al-Nisyān [the Game of Forgetting] is considered the Arabic postmodernist novel par excellence. The “nuṣ riwāʾī” [novelistic text] oscillates between historical, narrative, and meta-narrative time, as well as between diegetic and meta-textual narrators. Rather than aligning its authorial decentering and rhizomatic narrative structure with the collapsing of theological discourse as a totalizing force, this chapter reads Luʿbat al-Nisyān through Qurʾanic narratology and intertextuality. It situates the novel, on the one hand, in relation to Barrāda’s extensive critical writings on literary experimentation [tajrīb] and translation of Mikhail Bakhtin. On the other, it theorizes the work through narrative and formal modes and inflected by the Qurʾan—such as iltifāt, or rhetorical code-switching. Moreover, Luʿbat al-Nisyān’s use of multiple narrative perspectives and genealogies critically interrogates the hermeneutical practices surrounding the documentation, verification, and transmission of the apostolic tradition of hadith.

“Formalism” in Polish Literary Scholarship

Slavic Review ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 574-582
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Folejewski
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Russian Formalism ◽  
Literary Research ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
The Impact

In discussing the contribution of the Polish “Formal” or “Integral” School to the development of literary research, one of the difficulties is whether to view it mainly as an echo of Russian Formalism or as a scholarly movement in its own right. There is no doubt that the often strikingly suggestive theoretical slogans and undeniable practical achievements of the Russian Formalists—such as Shklovsky's insights on the theory of the novel, V. I. Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, M. A. Petrovsky's Morphology of the Short Story, and the research of Boris Tomashevsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky, and Roman Jakobson in the field of poetry—all greatly attracted those Polish scholars who were looking for a coherent, strictly literary set of criteria, discouraged as they were by the inflation of biographism and psychologism in literary research. Yet the impact of Russian Formalism was limited in scope and in many respects rather indirect. On the one hand, the reaction against the one-sidedness of the psychological school came in Poland independently, and in some ways even earlier than in Russia. For this the Polish scholars did not need to go to Russia—they had both ancient (Aristotle) and more modern sources (German, Italian, French, and others). On the other hand, many of the Polish scholars did not even know the Russian language, though they knew some Western languages very well. (The scholar who was to become the foremost promoter of Formalism, Manfred Kridl, knew very little Russian when he came to teach at the University of Wilno. It was under the influence and with the help of a group of students that he became familiar with the writings of the Formalists.)

scholarly journals VERB ELLIPSIS IN CHARLES DICKENS’S NOVEL: “BLEAK HOUSE” ELLIPSIS VERBA DALAM NOVEL CHARLES DICKENS: “BLEAK HOUSE”

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-16
Author(s):  
Susan Aryanti
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Descriptive Method

This research entitled “Verb Ellipsis in Charles Dickens’s Novel: Bleak House” discusses about the existence of verb ellipsis in the clause of the novel. The research uses theory from Nunan in his book entitled “Introducing Discourse Analysis” (1993). This research also uses theory from McShane in his book entitled “A Theory of Ellipsis” (2005). In addition, this research uses descriptive method to analyze the data based on the discussion. The data are taken from the novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens because it has many words that are omitted although the reader can still understand. Based on the analysis, the data can be indicated as verba ellipsis. It also includes the type of verba ellipsis, which is gapping. The data can be indicated as gapping because the verb can be omitted in the second part of the clause since it contains the same verb, such as verb position in the first and second clause. In other words, gapping is an ellipsis process that makes unseen verb. Additionally, this research is made to describe the role of verba ellipsis in the clause or in the conversation of the novel. Moreover, it also completes the previous research to discuss ellipsis especially about verb ellipsis.

scholarly journals The “One-Line-Portraitˮ in to the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: Freeing the Counter-Norms

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Hélène Fau
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Single Line ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

Abstract At the Ramsay’s Scottish summer home, where guests are promised an illusory trip to the lighthouse, Lily Briscoe, a post-impressionist painter, indulges into portraying Mrs Ramsay. Throughout the novel, the portrait changes forms, starting as a moving tree in the first section ‘The Window’ and ending, after Mrs Ramsay’s death, as a single line in the very last page of the novel where Lily Briscoe sees it as completed. The “passage into abstraction” satisfies her for she executes the vision she had. The plot follows the same scheme, unfolding through shifting perspectives and oscillating between the figurative and abstract stream of consciousness of each character. It thus reflects Lily’s unstable portrait and paves the way for a deterritorialised writing. This paper will analyse how the “actes graphiques” (the drawn as well as the written items) mutate into an abstract – and therefore non- or a-gendered – line in order to release the un-articulated and un-lived antimainstream love between Lily Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay.

scholarly journals The Impact of Capitalist Psychology of Mid Victorian Erain Charles Dickens’ Novel Great Expectations

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-30
Author(s):  
Muna Shrestha
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
First Person ◽  
Central Character ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
The Impact

My thesis argues that Charles Dickens reflects the capitalist psychology of mid Victorian London in his novel Great Expectations. It is fully narrated in the first person and a time conquering master piece of Charles Dickens. In this novel, he touches on expectations in the life of diverse characters, the greatest of which being the expectation of Pip, the central character of the novel and also his moves from childhood to adulthood. He portrays how difficult it is for a lower class person to become a gentleman. The life for the upper class is easy but the life for the lower class is hard and painful in Victorian England. He vividly represents the existing picture of the society working in the minds of various characters and their expectations. Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection and the eventual triumph of good over evil.The purpose of this study is to describe the writer’s view of capitalism and its consequences such as ending of family units, illness, mutual exploitation, human passions, expectations and selfishness through character and plot.

Dickens’s Tableaux

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-198
Author(s):  
Victoria Wiet
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Fallen Women ◽  
Sexual Histories ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
And Function

Victoria Wiet, “Dickens’s Tableaux: Melodrama and Sexual Opacity in David Copperfield and Bleak House” (pp. 167–198) This essay examines the features and function of tableaux in two novels by Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850) and Bleak House (1853), in order to rethink the influence of melodramatic conventions on the form of narrative fiction, particularly the understanding of female sexuality that melodrama afforded novelists. Taking Dickens as an important example, literary critics have typically associated melodrama with ostentatious legibility, but recent scholarship on the theatrical tableau has illuminated the complex ways the melodramatic stage both produced and occluded revelation. Drawing on this work, I demonstrate that the adaptation of the tableau into the novel form increases the possibility of illegibility because readers necessarily rely on the narrator’s description and interpretation of the material world. In David Copperfield and Bleak House, this remediation has particularly significant consequences for the representation of sexually compromised women. By inadequately revealing the sexual histories of suspected “fallen women,” densely visual but opaque scenes featuring Annie Strong, Martha Endell, and Honoria Dedlock defer judgment on their characters, with Lady Dedlock’s protracted illegibility preventing her plot from culminating in a decisive narrative or moral conclusion. Because the narrators of both novels depict these female characters as deliberately making themselves illegible, the novel tableau becomes an important way for Dickens to dramatize the fallibility of the omniscient and quasi-omniscient narrators of realist fiction.

GE0RGE GISSING'S AMBIVALENT REALISM

2004 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-248
Author(s):  
AARON MATZ
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Gissing ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Almost Everywhere ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Critical Writings

In this essay I examine one author's peculiar struggle with the implications and expectations of realism in �ction. In late-Victorian England, George Gissing was at the epicenter of the debates about realism in the novel; for many of his contemporaries he was the archetypal writer of realist �ction. His novels seemed to rely on the grim detail and un�inching techniques associated with that school, and in his criticism he returned constantly to the question of "the place of realism in �ction" (the title of an essay he wrote in 1895). But Gissing never reached a stable verdict on the subject. In his masterpiece, New Grub Street (1891), one of his destitute writer-�gures is nicknamed "the Realist" and preaches "an absolute realism"; in the ruthless world of Gissing's modern Grub Street, the catchword is almost everywhere. What is so odd about the novel is how Gissing's portraits of aspiring realists vacillate between genuine sympathy and merciless satire. Sometimes Gissing seems to identify with those who subscribe to a platform of late-Victorian realism; at other times he appears to mock the whole ridiculous affair. New Grub Street effectively dramatizes Gissing's ambivalence about the workings and purposes of realism in the novel. In this essay I study his vexed attitude by considering New Grub Street in relation to Gissing's Augustan satirical precursors, the response to his �ction in the 1890s, and his own critical writings from the era, especially his extensive commentary on Charles Dickens.

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