No description available.

The correspondence between Charles Dickens and Bernhard Tauchnitz (1816–1895), founder of the Tauchnitz Verlag in Leipzig, spans almost thirty years, between 1843 and 1870 – Dickens was one of the key authors in the Tauchnitz Edition, a series of books in English for Continental sale initiated in 1841. So far, only 29 of Dickens’s letters to Tauchnitz were known (and printed in the authoritative Pilgrim Edition), and none of the manuscripts could be consulted. In 1991, Gunter Böhnke discovered 34 of the original letters in Leipzig, of which 14 are unknown and seven others only in short extracts. This article briefly sketches the background of the relationship between Dickens and Tauchnitz, and reprints for the first time these 21 letters as transcribed from photocopies of the originals. In the footnotes, the other 22 known letters to Tauchnitz are also listed. As a whole, they illustrate Dickens’s interest in the publication of his works abroad (including payment for this, obviously), as well as his high regard for Tauchnitz. Among the personal information that can be glimpsed from the letters, the most interesting is probably Dickens’s son Charley’s two-year stay in Leipzig in 1853–4.

I denna uppsats genomför vi en komparativ textanalys av Charles Dickens verk om Oliver Twist och vi använder oss av en kvalitativ forskningsmetod. Verken vi har jämför är en översatt kapitelbok, Oliver Twist (2001) med en adapterad bilderbok, Oliver Twist (2019). Uppsatsens syfte är undersöka vad som har förändrats i de olika versionerna, där vi fokuserar på berättelsens intrig och karaktärer. Analysens resultat visar att detaljer i både händelser och karaktärer har reducerats men att bilderna i adaptionen bidrar med mycket av berättandet. Vidare används analysens resultat i en didaktisk diskussion för beskriva hur båda böckerna kan användas kombinerat i ett undervisningssammanhang för att utveckla elevers läsförståelse

No description available.

<p>The central thesis of <em>Bergsonian Metaphysical Undercurrents in Rorty’s Liberal Gradualism</em> is that those who take the greatest risks for social reformations are always motivated by the feeling of being part of something indefinitely greater than themselves and their own moral communities (however capacious these may be): progress just is this vague sense of indefinite movement, or becoming. In works such as <em>Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution,</em> and <em>The Two Sources of Morality and Religion</em>, Henri Bergson identified this sense of movement with time, the evolution of life, and the emotion of love respectively. Though he would probably laud Bergson’s insistence that philosophy should be partisan, Richard Rorty would be less hasty in making Bergson’s identifications, for Rorty thinks social progress is best served by gradual increases in our local sense of “us” effected by imaginary identification with others through literary exposures, not a mystical sense of oneness with all creation. Improvising on a Bergsonian note, I hold that one must already be an aspiring mystic, or moral hero, for one to get an expanded sense of “us” from reading literature. But such a lifestyle is incredibly difficult to maintain, requiring superhuman courage and moral reflection. It is only in the inspiring, active presence of a genuine moral hero that a readership will be able to make such efforts, and reliably take to literature the way Rorty would like in order to form his goal of a maximally capacious liberal utopia. Mystics act out of the metaphysical or religious conviction, whether real or imagined, that they are instruments of a great force of love. Rorty’s own utopian project would then be dependent on (and, perhaps, even an unknowing product of) these spiritual, metaphysical undercurrents of social progress.</p>

The Prelude and David Copperfield reveal strikingly similar patterns of their heroes' development from boyhood to manhood; the idiosyncrasy of their growth can be found in its retrogressive rather than progressive aspect.

This dissertation concerns nineteenth-century British novelists’ representations of unachieved aspirations. Through a blend of affect theory, materialist literary criticism, and formalist analysis, I examine a particularly frustrating problem addressed by these writers: the gap between a dream of social mobility and a reality of class paralysis for many working-class people. I am interested in the tropes of imprisonment, constraint, and confinement through which Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Morrison pondered this problem. I take into account these writers’ own limitations and imperfect social-progress ideology of melioration. These metaphors highlight the exploitation of impoverished people by the very institutions purportedly meant to encourage and mobilize them. In this project, I draw on Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism, Carolyn Lesjak’s study of the depleasurization of work in the Victorian novel, and Bruce Robbins’s theory of mobility and welfare as frameworks for interpreting what Victorian middle-class fiction writers do with the lived experience of poverty.

Afin d'explorer la transition du genre Gothique vers le Policier dans la fiction de Dickens, notre étude suivra un plan général en trois grandes parties, divisées elles-mêmes en trois chapitres chacune. Il s'agira tout d'abord de présenter le contexte sociétal qui a conduit à la collision de deux genres littéraires, le Gothique et le Policier. Pour cela nous définirons les caractéristiques du Gothique dickensien. Dickens met en scène un univers doublement familier – un univers qui appartient au passé, un monde réel connu de ses lecteurs, mais également un univers qui appartient à l'histoire de la fiction, qui relève d'une intertextualité forte, que l'on pourrait qualifier de typique, aisément partagée par ses lecteurs. En second lieu, nous nous tournerons vers les effets de cette transition violente sur la mémoire des personnages, en définissant d'abord l'expression du trauma dans la fiction de Dickens. Nous verrons que le trauma repose en particulier sur le trouble identitaire que créent le sentiment d'une faillite de l'appartenance, ainsi que la disparition des repères que les Victoriens, et les personnages que Dickens met en scène, pensaient immuables. Dans un troisième temps, nous montrerons comment le Gothique et le Policier interagissent dans la fiction de Dickens, en analysant les éléments de société qui expliquent, à notre avis, cette rencontre presque contre nature – puisqu'on pourrait supposer que l'explication rationnelle obtenue au terme d'une fiction policière résolve les tensions gothiques. Nous verrons qu'il n'en est rien, et que la résolution des enquêtes ne libère pas complètement la fiction d'un après-coup gothique. Afin d'illustrer cette ligne d'analyse, nous étudierons la passation des pouvoirs entre les hommes de loi et les détectives, une passation des pouvoirs visible à la fois dans la société victorienne et dans le texte dickensien, et enfin la rémanence du Gothique qui fait des détectives les antiquaires d'un nouveau genre. / In order to investigate the transition from the Gothic genre to the detective fiction in Charles Dickens's works, our study will first concentrate on the Victorian social context that led to the collision of two literary genres, the Gothic and the detective fiction. We will define Dickensian Gothic. Actually, Dickens stages a twofold familiar universe. One universe belongs to the past – a real world that is well known to the readers. The second universe shows an insertion in literary history of an intertextual fabric – described as typical and easily shared by his readers. We will then deal with the effects of this violent collision upon the characters' memories and will define the expression of trauma in Dickens's fiction. Trauma primarily rests upon identity confusion. It originates from a sense of failure of identity belonging together with a sense of loss of society bearings that Dickens's characters experience and thought to be immutable. Finally, we will show how Gothic and Detective fictions interact in Dickens's fiction. We will analyse the societal elements that explain this almost against nature meeting for we could assume that the rational explanation that comes at the end of the detective novel should solve the Gothic tensions. But in fact, the solving of the inquests doesn't free the fiction from a Gothic aftermath. We will then study the transfer of powers from lawyers to detective police officers. This transfer of powers is noticeable both in Victorian society and the Dickensian text. We will then conclude with the persistence of Gothic in Dickens's fiction that makes detective police officers some sort of antiquarians of a new genre.

The representation of Chancery court in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-3) emphasises the inaccessibility of this institution to members of the laity. Dickens’ critique of Chancery chimes with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological description of law as a formalistic social field defined by practices of exclusion. Dickens’ Chancery is however further inaccessible since it departs from Dickens’ laypeople’s horizons of expectation as a bureaucratic organisation characterised by its structural dispersion and the generation of great quantities of writing. This thesis therefore scrutinises Dickens’ treatment of Chancery in light of media-theoretical and geocritical, as well as sociological, frameworks and perspectives. This essay demonstrates that Dickens’ account of the institution of Chancery as conceptually inaccessible amounts to what I term a non-world heuristic. I contend that Dickens’ take on law anticipates what Fredric Jameson famously theorises as the dizzying “global world system” of late capitalism; the non-world heuristic of Bleak House—which combats disorientation in the social domain of law—may thus be understood as an early example of what Jameson terms an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping.” The non-world heuristic, this thesis proposes, likely has a role to play also in fictional attempts to cognitively map the global world system. I theorise the non-world heuristic in light of the discourse on accessibility in possible-worlds theory and the Kantian sublime, finding that the sublime non-world of Chancery is made accessible as inaccessible and that this dynamic is integral to Dickens’ aesthetic both as a maker of cognitive maps and as a realist novelist.

This work argues that the dynamics of the oral and of the literate consciousness play a vital role in the characterization of Bleak House. Through an application of Walter Ong's synthesis of orality/literacy research, Krook's residual orality is seen to play a greater role in his characterization than his more frequently discussed spontaneous combustion. Also, the role orality and literacy plays in understanding Dickens's satire of "philanthropic shams" is analyzed. This study concludes that an awareness of orality and literacy gives the reader of Bleak House a consistent framework for evaluating the moral quality of its characters and for understanding the broader social message underlying Dickens's topical satire.