The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens

ISBN-13: 9783319967905 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 276 str.

Peter Cook

Opis

This book explores the relationship between Dickens and canonical Romantic authors: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Keats.

Recenzje

"It is a pleasure to encounter a thoughtful, illuminating analysis of a familiar novel that offers a fresh and innovative perspective. ... The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens is Cook's extensive research, presented in a way that is readable, accessible and clear, avoiding the pitfall of making the book sound like a doctoral dissertation. ... the book will ultimately create a fruitful legacy of its own among future scholars." (Sara L. Pearson, Brontë Studies, Vol. 44 (4), October, 2019)

"Strengths of this study include its extensive close readings, attention to historical and cultural context, and identification of parallels between Romantic and Dickensian imagery. While the book will primarily be useful to literary scholars or humanists working on Dickens, it will also appeal to historians or scholars in cultural studies interested in the effects of industrialization, science, technology, modernity, and urbanization on the individual and society." (Kristen Starkowski, Journal of Victorian Culture, March 14, 2019)

Spis treści

Chapter 1: Introduction

Literary Context

A Methodology of Influence, Ecology and Things

Critical Context

Method, Design and Structure

Chapter 2: Childhood

Education Debates and Parental Aspirations

David Copperfield: Failing Families

Childhood to Adulthood

Heroes and Villains

Romantic Pedigree

Tempestuous Images

Great Expectations: a Novel without a Hero?

Character and Environment

Chapter 3: Time

Watches and Clocks

Dombey and Son: Hides and Hearts

‘A Watch That’ll Do You Credit’

Commonplace Obituaries, Infant Philosophy

A Wandering Princess and a Good Monster

Our Mutual Friend: the Poorest of Mr. Dickens’s Works

A Battle Within and Without

River and Rail

Chapter 4: Progress

Revolution and Science

Bleak House: Mudfog Revisited

Old School

Love One Another or Die

Hard Times outside London

Strangled in its cradle

Stale, flat, and unprofitable

Perfect Integrity

Chapter 5: Outsiders

Guilt and Isolation

Dickens and Master Humphrey

Unnatural Oppositions

Lonely Wanderers

Little Dorrit: Mind-forged Manacles

Pillars of Society

Familiar yet Misplaced

Nearly Everything of Importance

Chapter 6: Conclusion

O autorze

Peter Cook is Senior Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK. His publications cover a wide range of interests, from the Romantics to Ted Hughes.

Blurb

This book explores the relationship between Dickens and canonical Romantic authors: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Keats.  Addressing a significant gap in Dickens studies, four topics are identified: Childhood, Time, Progress, and Outsiders, which together constitute the main aspects of Dickens’s debt to the Romantics. Through close readings of key Romantic texts, and eight of Dickens’s novels, Peter Cook investigates how Dickens utilizes Romantic tropes to express his responses to the exponential growth of post-revolutionary industrial, technological culture and its effects on personal life and relationships. In this close study of Dickensian Romanticism, Cook demonstrates the enduring relevance of Dickens and the Romantics to contemporary culture.