The focus of this study is not so much the city in Dickens' novels, but man in the city, and particularly man in Victorian London - a city given over to the world of commerce. The conditions resulting from the victory of businessmen and the middle classes are central concerns in the later novels, and are mirrored in the city landscape: Dickens knows that it is in the industrial cities, and not in the countryside, that the social problems of his age must be resolved. Through their insistence that money can do everything, the new powers of the city turn London into an ultimately demonic world, characterized by isolation, confusion, and sterility; shaped into prisons, labyrinths, and wastelands. As the city expands through economic growth, it becomes a monster, threatening its inhabitants with a fearful 'otherness'. The first chapter of the study deals with the fact of change in Victorian London, a change defined by the victory of middle-class and free-enterprise 'Progress'. The succeeding five chapters describe the various ways in which Dickens' urban men attempt to evade the new facts of their environment: through ignorance and isolation, through the misuse of language, through the repression of sexuality and emotion, through the substitution of cash for all human relationships, and, finally, for the middle-classes, through physical escape into Suburbia. Dickens shows, however, that escape is futile: men can only defeat the demonic city by confronting it, and by rejecting (not protecting) its dehumanizing values. The final chapters offer an examination of the demonic and apocalyptic archetypes that structure Dickens' city and attempt to show that, in the later novels, it is necessary to pass through the demonic gulf in order to be redeemed into a happier vision of city life. The possibility of such a victory for urban men - if only on a limited scale, by a small number of characters - is testified to by the humour throughout the novels, and by the happy resolutions at the end. London as the great commercial city is most extensively treated in Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Little,Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, and these are the novels round which most of the study is centred. Although in Hard Times Dickens focuses specifically on the new industrial city, Coketown is only partially like London: everything is on a much smaller - almost on an intimate - scale, and it lacks the compensating 'big city' pleasures that make life in London a more complex issue than merely Man versus Progress. For these reasons, Hard Times is not dealt with as a central text. By their extensive focus on life outside London, Martin Chuzzlewit and David Copperfield are also limited in their applications' to this particular study. In both these novels, the hero's struggle for happiness and self-knowledge is determined only to a small degree by the city itself. The early city worlds of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist are used for two purposes. They point to some of the continuing concerns of Dickens' art, and they serve as a contrast to the later experiences of urban life: Pickwick Papers, through its ability to assimilate even the Fleet into a joyous vision of the world; and Oliver Twist, through its opposing insistence on a totally evil city. In the later novels, Dickens mediates between the two extremes: London lies somewhere between Eden and Hell. The study is structured along thematic lines, rather than through a series of self-contained essays on individual novels. In its organization, therefore, it must sometimes sacrifice the sense of each novel as an autonomous :word-world with its own unique logic, in order to suggest the coherence within Dickens' works as a whole. The order of development mimics, in a sense, the Dickensian response to the city: it moves cumulatively and inevitably from the discussion of disintegration and isolation of the first chapters towards a vision of London as the demonic city in Chapter VII, and it is only at the end, in the concluding section, that it can move out of the hellish gulf into the world of comedy. For Dickens too, the comic redemption is essential and cannot be left out, but in relationship to the totality of the city, it takes up only a fraction of the whole. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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[...] This thesis will be confined to a study of the benevolent gentlemen in Dickens novels, and will attempt to answer such questions as: Who were these men? For what purpose did Dickens create them? What function do they serve in the novels? How great, or how limited, is their scope of action? Did they provide Dickens with his ultimate answers to the problems of human behaviour? Chapter I will discuss the background, origin and characteristics of the benevolent gentlemen. Chapter II will describe the benevolent gentlemen of the early novels, Mr. Pickcwick (The Picknick Papers, 1836-37), Mr. Brownlow (Oliver Twist, 1837-39), the Cheeryble Brothers (Nicholas Nickleby, 1838-39), Mr. Garland and the Single Gentleman (The Old Curiosity Shop, 1840-41), and Scrooge (A Christmas Carol, 1843). Chapter III will be concerned with the benevolent gentlemen of Dickens' middle period, Mr. Jarndyce (Bleak House, 1852-53), Mr. Sleary (Hard Times, 1854), and Mr. Meagles (Little Dorrit, 1855-57). [...]

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This study analyzes William Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion) from the aspect of point of view. It shows how point of view is linked to theme in that the complexity of point of view parallels and emphasizes the complexity of truth as it exists in the novels. Each novel is examined separately, for each poses different problems involved in searching out truth and each is unique in point of view. The Hamlet is determined to have a predominantly omniscient narrator, The Town to be told by three first-person narrators, and The Mansion to combine omniscient with first-person narrative. The increasing complexity in point of view and in the search for truth leads to the conclusion that Faulkner was demonstrating that truth is not an absolute.

The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens' fourth novel, has been given little serious critical attention by modern scholars. The purpose of this study was to analyze the novel, ignoring the accepted prejudices against it and establishing it as a complex artistic creation.The organization of the study rests on the thesis that after Master Humphrey, the narrator of the first three chapters, dismisses himself from the story, the novel divides into four sections each focused on one of the four major characters-- Nell, Kit, Quilp, and Dick. The sections are not divided in the novel, but are complexly interwoven with the sections presenting different views of the major themes of the novel.Master Humrhrey's three-chapter introduction to the novel sets the plots of the four sections in motion and establishes the major concerns of the novel—alienation, creativity, and materialism. More important, Master Humphrey is the only artist whose consciousness is penetrated while he is in the act of creating.Nell’s section contains the most lengthy treatment of the major themes, but does not present the novel’s and as with Nell, his self-imposed, alienation ends in death. The similarity between Mrs. Quilp and Nell, and Nell, Mrs. Quilp's enjoyment of her suffering combine to raise the doubt that Nell's problems are imposed externally. Quilp's creativity is reflected in his ability to appear differently to different people around him. He recreates himself constantly.Dick Swiveller's progression from a morally careless rogue to a caring hero is the triumph of the novel, and his section contains the novel's solutions to the thematic problems. Unlike Nell, Kit, and Quilp, who retreat from society, Dick searches for companionship. He and the Marchioness solve the problem of alienation by finding each other. He also presents a compromise between the greed of Quilp and the grandfather and Nell's renunciation of material goods with his theory that money simply makes things more pleasant. Dick is the greatest creative artist in the novel for be uses his imagination to create a refuge for himself and his friends within an alien world. He creates through imaginative power the haven which Nell cannot find in her flight.