AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS A GENRE FEATURE OF COMING-OF-AGE NOVELS BY CH. DICKENS

2019 ◽  
pp. 36-42
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Life Experience ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Moral Behavior ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Life Stages ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Life Lessons ◽  
Martin Chuzzlewit ◽  
Nicholas Nickleby

The article explores autobiography as one of the genre features of the coming-of-age novels in the context of Charles Dickens’ legacy. Dickens’ realistic novels appeared as a result of his own life experience; the writer wanted to bring and share his views, ideas, life lessons with the readers and teach them to what he considered the correct moral behavior. Episodes of the author’s life, as if scattered through all his novels about a young man such as “Nicholas Nickleby”, “Martin Chuzzlewit”, “David Copperfield” and “The Great Expectations”. Autobiographical genre features are revealed in the coming-of-age novels in two ways– through a full depiction of the whole life stages or, alternately, with the help of the episodic retrospective description of life experience. In both cases the author draws up a rational balance of biographical facts, social and historical background of the era combined with artistic fictional reality.

scholarly journals Depiction of Human Tragedy in Literary Works

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3S) ◽  
pp. 226-230
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Life Style ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Entire Life ◽  
The Family ◽  
Two Cities ◽  
Romantic Novel ◽  
Nicholas Nickleby ◽  
Human Tragedy

Nickolas Nickleby is a romantic novel written by Charles Dickens, one of the prominent English writer of Elizabethan era remembered as the greatest novelist with his literary contributions in the form of novels, short stories, poetry and plays. Famous works among his numerous writings include “A Message from the Sea”, “Great Expectations”, “Oliver Twist”, and “A Tale of Two Cities”.Nicholas Nickleby is one of examples of the romantic genre in Charles Dickens works and it is his third novel. This novel explores the life and adventures of a young man named Nicholas Nickleby, who has to support his mother and sister, due to unexpected failure of his father. Nicholas Nickleby’s father loses his entire life savings and this results in his death. The family leaves from the comfortable life style and reaches their relative for support. The work shows real human tragedy which is analysed in this article. Keywords : Human tragedy, sense of moral val

scholarly journals An Attempt at Applying Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies ◽  
Khalid LAHLOU
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Organic Unity

The present paper is an attempt at approaching Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations from a morphological perspective based upon Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part is concerned with a brief view of the nature of formalism: its background and its process of analysis. The second part is devoted to putting into practice what has been dealt with in the first part. It will be mostly concerned with the question as to whether all the functions of dramatis personae as stated by Propp figure in the object of analysis, Great Expectations. Finally, the paper will draw the conclusion as to whether the aforementioned elements constitute an organic unity.

scholarly journals Of Grim Witches and Showy Lady-Devils: Wealthy Women in Literature and Film

Text Matters ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 50-65
Author(s):  
Veronika Schuchter
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Women In Literature ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Narrow Scope ◽  
Legal Restrictions ◽  
Societal Expectations ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
Wealthy Women

Imagining super rich women in the real and fictional world has long been a struggle. Those few depictions that do exist are scattered across time periods and literary genres, reflecting the legal restrictions that, at different points in time, would not allow women to accumulate assets independent of the patriarchal forces in their lives. The scarcity of extremely wealthy women in literature and film is confirmed by Forbes magazine’s list of the fifteen richest fictional characters that features forty different fictional men and only nine women, with never more than two female characters nominated in a single year. This article explores the depiction of three exceptionally wealthy women: Cruella de Vil in The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) by Dodie Smith, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens, and the figure of the stepmother in various adaptations of “Cinderella.” I demonstrate how the protagonists’ wealth allows them to manipulate others and disconnect themselves from patriarchal and societal expectations. Further, I argue that these affluent antagonists are “rogued” by their respective narratives, highlighting their perceived anti-feminine and emasculating behaviour resulting in a mode of narration that greedily gazes at and shames their appearances and supposed unattractiveness. While this genealogy of rich rogues reiterates the narrow scope of imagining wealthy women on the page and on the screen, there are moments in the narratives that disrupt stereotypical depictions of these wealthy characters who defy the labels imposed on them.

Emigration Aesthetics: Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and Catherine Helen Spence

2018 ◽  
pp. 161-190
Author(s):  
Fariha Shaikh
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Global Network ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
Martin Chuzzlewit ◽  
A Site

Chapter Five takes up this reading and interrogates the ways in emigration literature becomes a trope in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and David Copperfield (1850), Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison (1854). This chapter asserts that to ask how central or liminal emigration is to the plot of the novel is to miss the point. What is far more interesting is the ways in which the novels discussed here register the effects of emigration. They draw on the familiar tropes of emigration literature, but at the same time, they imagine a world in which emigration literature connects emigrants and their families and weaves them into the larger global network of the British empire. Thus, collectively, the last two chapters of this book demonstrate the hold that emigration literature had over the cultural imagination. Not only does it produce a stock of common tropes that other genres and media drew on, it also becomes a motif in them, a site of interrogation for the interrogation of texts that produced a widening settler world.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Culture Industry ◽  
Media Ecology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
The Media

The conclusion shows that several of the embodied aspects of writing fiction discussed for the eighteenth-century novel can be traced into the nineteenth century through an example from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. It is shown that, like the earlier authors in the case studies in this book, Dickens features shifting embodied stances and involves elements of the media ecology of his day rather than deploying the concrete particulars that “formal realism” considers central to the novel. Links to larger arguments about the role of the novel in literary history are then drawn in contrast with accounts, based on Adorno/Habermas and Benjamin, that argue that eighteenth-century fiction becomes rationalised and disembodied with the novel and its culture industry. Rather than impoverishing experience, it is argued that the novel as a lifeworld technology depends profoundly on readers’ embodied engagements and that 4E cognition is a critical perspective that affords such an alternative take.

‘To Let To Let To Let’

2020 ◽  
pp. 93-143
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Rite Of Passage ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
Private House ◽  
The World ◽  
David Copperfield ◽  
A Site

This chapter explores the significance of rented spaces in the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, reading David Copperfield and Great Expectations alongside novels by Catherine Gore and WM Thackeray. Some of the most memorable characters in these coming-of-age narratives are landlords and landladies, who act as mentors to the protagonist as he tries to find his place in the world. Dickens interrogates the idea that it is a rite of passage for a young man to take lodgings before he moves into a private house. The chapter reveals that Dickens uses spatial and architectural metaphors, including images drawn from the world of tenancy, to articulate the process of growing up. It ends with a section on the window tax debate of the 1840s and 1850s and the traces it leaves in the fiction of the period; the window is a site charged with symbolism for characters preoccupied with their ‘prospects’.

The HUGE presence of Lindley Murray

English Today ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-61
Author(s):  
Lyda Fens–De Zeeuw
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Uncle Tom's Cabin ◽  
English Grammar ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Edgar Allen Poe ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Nicholas Nickleby

The grammarian Lindley Murray (1745–1826), according to Monaghan (1996), was the author of the best selling English grammar book of all times, calledEnglish Grammarand first published in 1795. Not surprisingly, therefore, his work was subjected to severe criticism by later grammarians as well as by authors of usage guides, who may have thought that Murray's success might negatively influence the sales figures of their own books. As the publication history of the grammar in Alston (1965) suggests, Murray was also the most popular grammarian of the late 18thand perhaps the entire 19thcentury, and this is most clearly reflected in the way in which a wide range of 19th- and even some 20th-century literary authors, from both sides of the Atlantic, mentioned Lindley Murray in their novels. Examples are Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852), George Eliot (Middlemarch, 1871–2), Charles Dickens, in several of his novels (Sketches by Boz, 1836;Nicholas Nickleby, 1838–9;The Old Curiosity Shop1840–1;Dombey & Son, 1846–8); Oscar Wilde (Miner and Minor Poets, 1887) and James Joyce (Ulysses, 1918) (Fens–de Zeeuw, 2011: 170–2). Another example is Edgar Allen Poe, who according to Hayes (2000) grew up with Murray's textbooks and used his writings as a kind of linguistic touchstone, especially in his reviews. Many more writers could be mentioned, and not only literary ones, for in a recent paper in which Crystal (2018) analysed the presence of linguistic elements in issues ofPunchpublished during the 19thcentury, he discovered that ‘[w]heneverPunchdebates grammar, it refers to Lindley Murray’. Murray, according to Crystal, ‘is the only grammarian to receive any mention throughout the period, and his name turns up in 19 articles’ (Crystal, 2018: 86). Murray had become synonymous with grammar prescription, and even in the early 20thcentury, he was still referred to as ‘the father of English Grammar’ (Johnson, 1904: 365).

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