Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt and Charles Dickens all worked as parliamentary reporters, but their experiences in the press gallery have not received much scrutiny. Nikki ...Hessell's study is the first work to consider all four of these canonical writers as gallery reporters, providing a detailed picture of this intriguing episode in their careers. Hessell challenges preconceived notions about the role that emergent literary genius played in their success as reporters, arguing instead that they were consummate gallery professionals who adapted themselves to the journalistic standards of their day. That professional background fed in to their creative work in unexpected ways. By drawing on a wealth of evidence in letters, diaries and the press, this study provides fresh insights into the ways in which four great writers learnt the craft of journalism and brought those lessons to bear on their career as literary authors.
InThe One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are one of the chief pleasures of Dickens's novels but that go regularly unnoticed in ...Dickensian criticism: the linguistic infrastructure of his textured prose. Stewart, in effect, looks over the reader's shoulder in shared fascination with the local surprises of Dickensian phrasing and the restless undertext of his storytelling. For Stewart, this phrasal undercurrent attests both to Dickens's early immersion in Shakespearean sonority and, at the same time, to the effect of Victorian stenography, with the repressed phonetics of its elided vowels, on the young author's verbal habits long after his stint as a shorthand Parliamentary reporter.
To demonstrate the interplay and tension between narrative and literary style, Stewart draws out two personas within Dickens: the Inimitable Boz, master of plot, social panorama, and set-piece rhetorical cadences, and a verbal alter ego identified as the Other, whose volatile and intensively linguistic, even sub-lexical presence is felt throughout Dickens's fiction. Across examples by turns comic, lyric, satiric, and melodramatic from the whole span of Dickens's fiction, the famously recognizable style is heard ghosted in a kind of running counterpoint ranging from obstreperous puns to the most elusive of internal echoes: effects not strictly channeled into the service of overall narrative drive, but instead generating verbal microplots all their own. One result is a new, ear-opening sense of what it means to take seriously Graham Greene's famous passing mention of Dickens's "secret prose."
Dickens's Style Tyler, Daniel
07/2013, Letnik:
v.Series Number 86
eBook
Charles Dickens, generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age, was known as 'The Inimitable', not least for his distinctive style of writing. This collection of twelve essays ...addresses the essential but often overlooked subject of Dickens's style, with each essay discussing a particular feature of his writing. All the essays consider Dickens's style conceptually, and they read it closely, demonstrating the ways it works on particular occasions. They show that style is not simply an aesthetic quality isolated from the deepest meanings of Dickens's fiction, but that it is inextricably involved with all kinds of historical, political and ideological concerns. Written in a lively and accessible manner by leading Dickens scholars, the collection ranges across all Dickens's writing, including the novels, journalism and letters.
Charles Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. This book illuminates the worlds - social, political, economic and ...artistic - in which Dickens worked. Dickens's professional life encompassed work as a novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. This volume offers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens's age, work and legacy, and uncovering sometimes surprising faces of the man and of the range of Dickens industries. Through 45 digestible short chapters written by a leading expert on each topic, a rounded picture emerges of Dickens's engagement with his time, the influence of his works and the ways he has been read, adapted and re-imagined from the nineteenth century to the present.
Charles Dickens is arguably the greatest storyteller in English Literature and his novels have been loved and respected for nearly two hundred years. As accurate reflections of Victorian society they ...are unparalleled. Vivid characters and realistic settings are created in the mind of the reader, all laced with Dickens inimitable humour, wit and lacerating political comment. This book aims to bring alive these characters and settings in the minds of children. It provides a comprehensive resource for children not only to learn about the literary heritage of the English language, but also to encourage them to create meanings from these classic stories through their personal, social and cultural experiences. The authors set each novel in context, providing a synopsis of the book, as well as characters, settings themes and symbolism. Works covered include: (1) A Christmas Carol; (2) Bleak House; (3) David Copperfield; (4) Great Expectations; (5) Hard Times; and (6) Oliver Twist. But this book doesn't just aim to introduce classic literature to children; it also provides a wide range of truly contemporary tools with which they can respond creatively, including: drama and film, blogs, web 2.0 technologies, multimodality and animation and graphic novels. The book is also accompanied by a CD which contains chapter outlines, extended text extracts, and practical resource sheets, including PowerPoint presentations, book review templates and flash cards, as well as a set of 8 week lesson plans for each novel. "The Essential Charles Dickens School Resource" provides essential classroom learning material for teachers and literacy co-ordinators teaching Key Stages 1-3, as well as CPD students and those studying on PGCE English/Drama courses.
Fascinated by them, unable to ignore them, and imaginatively stimulated by them, Charles Dickens was an acute and unsentimental reporter on the dogs he kept and encountered during a time when they ...were a burgeoning part of the nineteenth-century urban and domestic scene. As dogs inhabited Dickens's city, so too did they populate his fiction, journalism, and letters. In the first book-length work of criticism on Dickens's relationship to canines, Beryl Gray shows that dogs, real and invented, were intrinsic to Dickens's vision and experience of London and to his representations of its life. Gray draws on an array of reminiscences by Dickens's friends, family, and fellow writers, and also situates her book within the context of nineteenth-century attitudes towards dogs as revealed in the periodical press, newspapers, and institutional archives. Integral to her study is her analysis of Dickens's texts in relationship to their illustrations by George Cruikshank and Hablot Knight Browne and to portraiture by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists like Thomas Gainsborough and Edwin Landseer. The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination will not only enlighten readers and critics of Dickens and those interested in his life but will serve as an important resource for scholars interested in the Victorian city, the treatment of animals in literature and art, and attitudes towards animals in nineteenth-century Britain.
Sixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as Agent of Change to show how Dickens was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy ...in the Inimitable's protean style, registered and commented on the ongoing changes in the Victorian world while the Victorians' fictional and factional worlds kept (and keep) changing. The essays from notable Dickens scholars-Malcolm Andrews, Matthias Bauer, Joel J. Brattin, Doris Feldmann, Herbert Foltinek, Robert Heaman, Michael Hollington, Bert Hornback, Norbert Lennartz, Chris Louttit, Jerome Meckier, Nancy Aycock Metz, David Paroissien, Christopher Pittard, and Robert Tracy-suggest the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated in Dickens' works through four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. An afterword by the late Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens changed the life of one eminent Dickensian.
Television and film, not libraries or scholarship, have made Charles Dickens the most important unread novelist in English. It is not merely that millions of people feel comfortable deploying the ...word 'Dickensian' to describe their own and others' lives, but that many more people who have never read Dickens know what Dickensian means. They know about Dickens because they have access to over a century of adaptations for the big and small screen. Because Dickens has proven to be the most easily adapted of major novelists, he has become, somewhat ironically, one of the foremost novelists in the English canon. This is ironic because it was just this capacity to entertain that once confined him to the margins of the 'great tradition' in fiction. Dickens on Screen is an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike. It provides an exhaustive filmography and is well illustrated.
