Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Charles Dickens'
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JUBAULT, RICHARD. "L'hysterie chez charles dickens." Rennes 1, 1992. http://www.theses.fr/1992REN1M098.
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Malcolmson, Catherine Margaret. "Constructing Charles Dickens, 1900-1940." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/27742.
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This thesis examines the popular and cultural legacy of Charles Dickens in the period 1900-1940. During this period Dickens was largely ignored or derided within the academy but his works remained consistently marketable to a popular audience. The thesis explores Dickens’s mass cultural appeal, assessing what the term ‘Dickensian’ represented in the early decades of the twentieth century and evaluating Dickens’s role as a national figure. This thesis engages with recent scholarship in the fields of Dickens criticism, heritage studies and material culture to explore a popular appreciation of Dickens which is characterised by its language of feeling and affect. The first chapter situates Charles Dickens’s literary standing and cultural legacy in the light of both critical and popular responses to his work. The chapter charts the development of the Dickens Fellowship and examines the role of this literary society in constructing and promoting a selective public image of Dickens. Chapter Two examines the motivations behind different forms of collecting, and suggests that collecting can be understood as a form of popular engagement with Dickens’s writing. The chapter contends that Dickensian collecting differs significantly from broader collecting practices and can be viewed as a more generous model of collecting. The idea of collecting as a popular response to Dickens is extended in Chapter Three which takes as its focus one particular form of book collecting: the practice of grangerization. Grangerization is characterised as an alternative reading practice through which the experience of reading a text could be extended. Two further alternative reading practices are explored in Chapters Four and Five. Chapter Four demonstrates how in founding the ‘Dickens House Museum’, the Dickens Fellowship aimed to create a permanent memorial site for Dickens. The chapter highlights the language of feeling utilised in the promotional material for the museum and argues that the items selected for display were designed to produce an emotional and imaginative response in the museum’s visitors. Chapter Five considers how readers expressed their engagement with Dickens’s works through literary pilgrimages to sites from his novels. The chapter suggests that these pilgrimages represent an active reading of Dickens’s novels, which offer readers a participatory experience of immersion in the world of the narrative. It argues that this kind of immersive experience is generated by the strong affective responses of many readers to Dickens’s writings.
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Cook, Peter. "Charles Dickens : the Romantic legacy." Thesis, Anglia Ruskin University, 2017. http://arro.anglia.ac.uk/701688/.
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This thesis investigates the relationship between the fiction of Charles Dickens and the work of canonical Romantic Period authors: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John Keats, with a view to assessing the influence of these Romantic writers on Dickens’s novels and stories. The reason for the investigation is that, while other influences on Dickens: the eighteenth-century novel, popular culture, melodrama, and the sentimental tradition have been thoroughly investigated recently, the influence of the Romantics has been relatively neglected. Four topics are identified: Childhood, Time, Progress, and Outsiders, which together constitute the main thematic aspects of Dickens’s debt to the Romantics. The use of imagery as a structural, unifying device, rather than a decorative, pictorial addition, is also identified as a significant common feature. Close readings of key Romantic texts, and eight of Dickens’s novels, draw out comparisons and contrasts, indicating the ways in which Dickens appropriated and adapted Romantic tropes and devices. It was found that the influence of the Romantics on Dickens’s fiction is more extensive and important than has previously been recognised. Essentially, Dickens turns to these Romantic tropes and devices to express his responses to the exponential growth of industrial, technological culture, and its effects on personal life and relationships, that was happening as he wrote. The modern society that provoked these complex responses did not exist when the eighteenth-century authors that Dickens loved were writing. The Romantics, on the other hand, witnessed the dawn of this new social order, and experimented with ways of expressing it. Dickens found in them a basis on which to build. These findings demonstrate that the Romantic legacy needs to be taken into account far more seriously in order to arrive at a balanced, fully-rounded understanding of Dickens’s achievement.
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Cook, Peter. "Charles Dickens: The Romantic Legacy." Thesis, Anglia Ruskin University, 2017. https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/id/eprint/701688/1/Cook_2017.pdf.
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This thesis investigates the relationship between the fiction of Charles Dickens and the work of canonical Romantic Period authors: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John Keats, with a view to assessing the influence of these Romantic writers on Dickens’s novels and stories. The reason for the investigation is that, while other influences on Dickens: the eighteenth-century novel, popular culture, melodrama, and the sentimental tradition have been thoroughly investigated recently, the influence of the Romantics has been relatively neglected.
Four topics are identified: Childhood, Time, Progress, and Outsiders, which together constitute the main thematic aspects of Dickens’s debt to the Romantics. The use of imagery as a structural, unifying device, rather than a decorative, pictorial addition, is also identified as a significant common feature. Close readings of key Romantic texts, and eight of Dickens’s novels, draw out comparisons and contrasts, indicating the ways in which Dickens appropriated and adapted Romantic tropes and devices.
It was found that the influence of the Romantics on Dickens’s fiction is more extensive and important than has previously been recognised. Essentially, Dickens turns to these Romantic tropes and devices to express his responses to the exponential growth of industrial, technological culture, and its effects on personal life and relationships, that was happening as he wrote. The modern society that provoked these complex responses did not exist when the eighteenth-century authors that Dickens loved were writing. The Romantics, on the other hand, witnessed the dawn of this new social order, and experimented with ways of expressing it. Dickens found in them a basis on which to build.
These findings demonstrate that the Romantic legacy needs to be taken into account far more seriously in order to arrive at a balanced, fully-rounded understanding of Dickens’s achievement.
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Gager, Valerie L. "Shakespeare and Dickens : the dynamics of influence /." Cambridge [GB] : Cambridge university press, 1996. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb358673157.
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Texte remanié de: Th. Ph. D.--Birmingham (GB)--Shakespeare institute, University of Birmingham, 1991. Titre de soutenance : "So potent art" : Shakespearean influences upon the works of Charles Dickens.Contient une liste d'allusions à Shakespeare extraites de l'oeuvre de Dickens. Bibliogr. p.378-409. Index.
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Henery, James R. "A literary and theological analysis of selected novels by Charles Dickens for use in secondary schools and Christian education." Theological Research Exchange Network (TREN), 1986. http://www.tren.com.
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Sadrin, Anny. "L'Être et l'avoir dans les romans de Charles Dickens." Lille : Paris : Atelier national reprod. th. Univ. Lille 3 ; diffusion Didier Erudition, 1985. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb36091112k.
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Stuart, Daniel. "Stalking Dickens: Predatory Disturbances in the Novels of Charles Dickens." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2020. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1707270/.
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Stalking in the nineteenth century was a dangerous, increasingly violent behavior pattern circulating in society. It was as much a criminal act then as now, and one the Victorian novel exposes as a problematic form of unwanted intrusion. The realist novel of this period alongside its more sensational counterparts not only depicts scenes of close surveillance, obsession, and harassment as harmful. It exposes the inability of social laws to regulate such conduct. I argue Charles Dickens is the most pivotal figure in observing how stalking emerged as not only a fictional motif, but as an inescapable, criminal behavior pattern. Throughout his work and its nuanced characters, Dickens reveals underlying truths about stalking and stalkers. Early books like Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop feature Gothic villains and predatory motifs adapted from prior literary genres. The works of his middle period foreground stalking in the context of the modern city and institutional power. In the final decade of his life, problems associated with unrequited love examine the pathological patterns of romantic obsession in modern stalker archetypes. Such an analysis and its transformative insight perceive crucial truths about unwanted intrusion, social attachment, and problem of predatory behavior.
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Harvey, Alban Thomas. "The historical novels of Charles Dickens." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.293764.
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Coats, Jerry B. (Jerry Brian). "Charles Dickens and Idiolects of Alienation." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1993. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc277905/.
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A part of Charles Dickens's genius with character is his deftness at creating an appropriate idiolect for each character. Through their discourse, characters reveal not only themselves, but also Dickens's comment on social features that shape their communication style. Three specific idiolects are discussed in this study. First, Dickens demonstrates the pressures that an occupation exerts on Alfred Jingle from Pickwick Papers. Second, Mr. Gradgrind from Hard Times is robbed of his ability to communicate as Dickens highlights the errors of Utilitarianism. Finally, four characters from three novels demonstrate together the principle that social institutions can silence their defenseless constituents. Linguistic evaluation of speech habits illuminates Dickens's message that social structures can injure individuals. In addition, this study reveals the consistent and intuitive narrative art of Dickens.
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Eslick, Mark Andrew. "Charles Dickens : anti-Catholicism and Catholicism." Thesis, University of York, 2011. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2243/.
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This thesis explores the role of anti-Catholicism and Catholicism in the life and work of Charles Dickens. A critical consensus has emerged that Dickens was vehemently anti-Catholic. Yet a 'curious dream' he had of his beloved dead sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, in which her spirit appears to him in the guise of the Madonna, suggests that his overt anti-Catholicism masks a profoundly complex relationship to the 'Church of Rome'. 'Dickens: Anti-Catholicism and Catholicism' therefore re-evaluates the anti-Catholic sentiments in the author's novels, journalism and letters by contextualizing them in relation to key events of the nineteenth-century Catholic revival such as the 1850 Papal Aggression. I argue that Dickens often employs anti-Catholicism not simply as a religious prejudice, but as a mode of discourse through which he disrupts, displaces or reinforces a range of secular anxieties. 'Dickens: Anti-Catholicism and Catholicism' also uncovers and explores the often cryptic moments in Dickens's writing when Catholic motifs are invoked that suggest a strange 'attraction of repulsion' to Roman Catholicism. Catholicism seems to offer him a rich source of imaginative and narrative possibilities. Reading Dickens's fiction through the lens of Catholicism can therefore reveal a much more ambivalent relationship to the religion than his apparent beliefs as well as unearthing new ways of thinking about his work.
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Herst, Beth. "The Dickens hero : selfhood and alienation in the Dickens world /." London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb35501786n.
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Samiei, Catherine. "Rediagnosing Dickens : disease and medical issues in the work of Charles Dickens." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2003. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk/R?func=search-advanced-go&find_code1=WSN&request1=AAIU178101.
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This thesis explores the possibility of re-reading texts and key scenes in Dickens by placing his fictional work in the context of nineteenth century historical and medical debates. These readings often reveal hidden discourses or subtexts which are embedded in Dickens's fiction, sometimes operating independently of the wider plots and narratives. Five key medical issues or debates are selected to provide a framework for rediagnising or proving alternative re-readings of Dickens's work. They are issues surrounding the aetiologies of disease, attitudes and responses to disability, the professionalisation of medicine and nursing, the link between crime, illness and criminal culpability and the debates surrounding ideal states of health. Aetiologies of disease are considered alongside contemporary critical responses to disease and social reform in Dickens's fiction and their impact on key figures, scenes and plot development. By examining attitudes and responses to disability the thesis explores how whilst Dickens clearly participates in traditional stereotypical depictions of disability he is also challenging conventional attitudes. In relation to the nineteenth century professionalisation of medicine and nursing, Dickens participates in rewriting the changing role of physicians and nurses. Ideas of nursing and professional care are contrasted with care motivated by family ties and the compassion of individuals. Crime, illness and criminal culpability are explored with a focus on epilepsy, and how illness is used as a metaphor and as part of characterisation. Villainous characters are reread in the light of this condition. Finally, the thesis concludes with an examination of health, identifying what Dickens advocated as a healthy state and how this could be maintained. Ultimately, the thesis reveals the increasing complexity with which Dickens engages with these debates. This historical and cultural approach provides a method to explore both Dickens's life and his fiction.
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Moore, Grace. "Dickens's others : discourses of class, race and colonialism in the work of Charles Dickens." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.322244.
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Henson, Louise. "Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Victorian science." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.323196.
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Vlassova-Place, Irina. "Mythological aspects of fiction of Charles Dickens." Thesis, University of Reading, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.263049.
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Bell, Emily. "Changing representations of Charles Dickens, 1857-1939." Thesis, University of York, 2017. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/19702/.
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This thesis examines representations of Charles Dickens in the period 1857 to 1939, arguing that both the period and the texts themselves have been critically overlooked and treated as homogeneous in the history of Dickens’s reputation and biographical archive. It analyses biographical discourse including Dickens’s speeches and journalism in the period 1857 to 1870, John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74), auto/biographical writings by Dickens’s family from 1880 to 1939, institutional forms of commemoration in the twentieth century, and writings by Dickens’s collaborators and colleagues George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates, Percy Fitzgerald, Marcus Stone and Wilkie Collins. It shows that there are recurring questions of memory, self-fashioning, authority, authorial identity, interpretation and commemoration, and provides a fuller understanding of the history of Dickens biography. The texts are brought into dialogue with letters, articles and unpublished archival material. Chapter 1 focuses on Dickens’s self-construction with regard to his childhood and career, and his approach to death. It shows how Dickens was thinking, writing and speaking autobiographically in the 1850s and 1860s, highlighting the author’s ambivalence about commemorating writers. Chapter 2 contextualises Forster’s biography against other accounts from the 1870s, contending that the Life’s success stems not only from its revelations about Dickens’s childhood but also from Forster’s attempts to interpret and explain Dickens, which tie together biography, literary analysis and the idea of the ‘characteristic’ Dickens. Chapter 3 discusses accounts published by the Dickens family alongside other commemorative acts, including the editing of letters and the founding of the Boz Club and the Dickens Fellowship. Chapter 4 offers a nuanced analysis of the different kinds of life writing undertaken by Dickens’s ‘young men’, analysing Collins, Fitzgerald and Stone as well as the better known Sala and Yates. Together the chapters offer a metacritical analysis of Dickensian biographical discourse in the period.
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Furneaux, Holly. "Homoeroticism in the novels of Charles Dickens." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 2005. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1444685/.
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This thesis examines the wealth of representations of same-sex desire throughout Dickens's literary career, deploying a combination of historicist, feminist and queer theory approaches to challenge the continued silencing of sexually subversive material in current Dickens studies. Without eliding their important differences the project explores both male and female homoeroticism, recognising such articulations as part of Dickens's wider exploration of the socially and sexually disenfranchised who could not be accommodated within the rigid parameters of a respectability exemplified by the institution of marriage. This thesis positions Dickens's fiction as central to queer literary history. Identifying key literary, historical and experiential sources for Dickens's acquisition of sexual knowledge, it is demonstrated that Dickens adapted culturally available representations of same-sex desire to develop influential strategies of homoerotic articulation. Chapter one explores factors that contribute to the received reading of Dickens's work as deeply conservative in terms of gender and sexuality through the case study of Miss Wade. She is retextualised through a recognition of the character's debt to existing models of female same-sex desire and analysis of her relationships' resonance with other female couples in the Dickens canon. The second chapter focuses on the idealisation of alternative patterns of living in Dickens's fiction. The celebration of male bachelorhood and attention to female resistances to marriage militate against critical conceptions of the Dickensian domestic ideal. Chapter three continues the interrogation of the familial ideal, contending that 'in-lawing' (the male homoerotic strategy of marrying a sister of the male favourite) was one of the major strategies through which Dickens and his contemporaries articulated, mediated and transferred same-sex desire. This identification of homocentric strategies demonstrates the fallacy of the dominant critical assumption that the homoerotic emerges most strongly in Dickens's work through violence. Instead, this thesis demonstrates that malevolent manifestations of same-sex desire are part of a wider spectrum of homoerotic representation that also includes highly positive depictions. The final chapters extend the examination of Dickens's career-long commitment to developing pioneering strategies for the positive articulation of same-sex desire. Through attention to Dickens's deployment of homotropical relocation, chapter four argues that Dickens drew upon those sites that were imaginatively sexualised in contemporary culture to re-negotiate the erotically unsatisfying conventional model of domesticity. Chapter five uncovers the highly erotic connotations of gentler ways of touching during the period of Dickens's career, focusing on the Victorian sexualisation of nursing to argue that Dickens deploys this eroticising of nurse/patient roles to develop more affirmative, tender strategies for articulating same-sex desire.
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Curl, Michael W. "Virtue in the world of Charles Dickens." [Chico, Calif. : California State University, Chico], 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10211.4/164.
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Czoik, Peter. "Zur Struktur der Dickens-Motive in Franz Kafkas Roman "Der Verschollene" "meine Absicht war, ... einen Dickensroman zu schreiben"." Hamburg Kovač, 2009. http://d-nb.info/996716297/04.
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Waters, Catherine. "Dickens and the politics of the family /." Cambridge [GB] : Cambridge university press, 1997. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb37036559f.
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Daldry, G. "Charles Dickens and the form of the novel : 'Fiction' and 'narrative' in Dickens' work." Thesis, University of Liverpool, 1985. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.370478.
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Morgan, Maggie. "The polyphonic "voice of society" a stylistic analysis of Our mutual friend /." Auburn, Ala., 2007. http://repo.lib.auburn.edu/2007%20Spring%20Theses/MORGAN_MAGGIE_15.pdf.
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Smith, Ralph. "Fever Narrative in the Fiction of Charles Dickens." Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/23502.
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This thesis argues that what it terms fever narratives figure prominently in Charles Dickens’s fiction. Fever was regarded not as a symptom but as a generic disease that had sub-species, such as cholera, smallpox, typhus and typhoid, and that presented itself through devastating epidemics that frightened the public and drove the government to enact public health legislation. The core elements of the fever narrative – such as fever’s cause, pathology, treatment and prevention – were still not clearly understood. This inevitably heightened public anxiety and frustration, particularly given lengthy delays in the bureaucratic processes of Parliament and local governments in dealing with fever’s perennial threat.
The politically favoured sanitarian narrative influenced Dickens significantly. Sanitarians believed that water and sewer projects in urban localities and improved sanitary practices would prevent most diseases. However, Dickens was influenced also by an alternative approach that this thesis calls the “medical narrative,” comprising a more holistic vision of public health, reliant on improved treatments, greater medical professionalism, and specialized hospitals, in addition to sanitary reform. Dickens’s 1840s novels reflected both approaches, but he emphasized the medical narrative in portrayals of the fevers of individual characters. In the 1850s, the predominant focus of fever narratives in Dickens’s journals and novels became fever of the social body – fever that figuratively infected English institutions or the country as a whole.
Dickens’s fever narratives became progressively darker during these two decades and, with each novel onward from Dombey and Son (1846-48), his representations of fever apocalypses infecting both the rich and the poor became more strident, even to the extent of suggesting that the whole institutional and economic infrastructure of the country would suffer an irrevocable blow. The thesis argues that Dickens presented these minatory scenes of vengeance in response to what he perceived as the blindness of the middle class to the condition of the sick and poor of England. This reached a climax with “Revolutionary fever” in A Tale of Two Cities (1859).
The thesis presents a final argument that Dickens’s stories of the early 1860s and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) provided both a continuation of and a denouement for the two previous decades’ fever narratives, by offering a view of the dust of corpse upon corpse of those who were mowed down by fever, and of a river polluted by this dust. However, he foresees also the possibility of the fundamental regeneration of a more humane physical, social and institutional environment in England.
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Puglia, Daniel. "Charles Dickens: um escritor no centro do capitalismo." Universidade de São Paulo, 2006. http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8147/tde-06112007-103719/.
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O objetivo desta tese é uma análise do romance Dombey e Filho (1848), de Charles Dickens. Esse é seu sétimo romance e representa um divisor de águas em sua obra: a crítica social, a observação dos costumes e o diagnóstico da época passaram a ser feitos de um modo mais incisivo. Sempre com a preocupação de relacionar a forma literária e o processo social, nossa hipótese é a de que o narrador de Dombey e Filho, ao materializar os paradoxos da sociedade inglesa em meados do século XIX, busca soluções estéticas para contradições da realidade. A despeito das mudanças ocorridas nesses cento e cinquenta anos, e agora num contexto mais amplo, partes substanciais de tais contradições foram acentuadas, continuando em vigor, além disso, o certo estatuto de normalidade que as acompanham. Nesse sentido, nosso desafio é procurar na própria forma da obra os índices de algo que está para além dela: em seu presente e em seu futuro.The aim of this thesis is the analysis of the novel Dombey and Son (1848), by Charles Dickens. It is his seventh novel and represents a watershed in his work: in it, social criticism, the observation of manners and the diagnosis of the age became more incisive. Always bearing in mind the attempt to establish the relationship between literary form and social process, I argue that the narrator in Dombey and Son tries to elaborate aesthetic solutions for real contradictions while dealing with paradoxical midnineteenth- century English society. Despite all the changes since then, and in a broader context now, substantial parts of these contradictions have been emphasized, acquiring a certain degree of accepted normality. In this sense, our challenge is to investigate in the very form of the novel signs of something that goes beyond it: in its present and in its future.
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Christoph, Lydia K. "Disenchantment the formation, distortion, and transformation of identity in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations /." Lynchburg, Va. : Liberty University, 2009. http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu.
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Hooper, Keith William James. "Dickens : faith and his early fiction." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/68154.
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This thesis, focusing on Dickens' early work ('Our Parish'to The Old Curiosity Shop), explorers the nature and fictional expression of the author's faith and the historical ecclesiastical elements of his writing. Dickens passionately believed that the Church was failing in its Christian responsibility to the poor. Contrary to contemporary religious thought, he neither accepted that the appalling depravation endured by the poor esulted from their personal sin, or that the imperative of spiritual redemption negated the Church's responsibility to ease their physical distress. He also realised that among his predominately London-based middle-class readership there was genuine ignorance of the reality of the suffering endured by the poor. In his early fiction Dickens used a two stage approach to communicate his personal beliefs about the poor. The first, adopted in 'Our Parish' and the first seven chapters of Oliver Twist, involved the graphic description of the suffering endured by the poor and the exposure of the inadequacies of the parochial system upon which they depended. Next, Dickens introduces his readers to a series of characters who embody his perception of Christian charity. Mr Pickwick, Mr brownlow and Charles Cheeryble (collectively referred to in this thesis as 'Charitable Angels')are, contrary to parochial officials and those who participate in charitable activity for their own selfish ends, shown to make a difference in the lives of those they assist. Dickens hoped that his readers would be inspired to emulate their actions.
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Cain, Lynn Fiona. "The fouled nest : Dickens, family, authorship." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.313549.
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Ho, Lai-ming Tammy. "Reading aloud and Charles Dickens's style." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2005. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B35512386.
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Lary, Nikita M. "Dostoevsky and Dickens : a study of literary influence /." London : Routledge, 2009. http://opac.nebis.ch/cgi-bin/showAbstract.pl?u20=9780415482516.
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Welch, Brenda Jean Losey Jay Brian. "Charles Dickens's Bleak house Benthamite jurisprudence and the law, or what the law is and what the law ought to be /." Waco, Tex. : Baylor University, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2104/5158.
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Jarvie, Paul A. "Ready to trample on all human law : financial capitalism in the fiction of Charles Dickens /." New York : Routledge, 2005. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40061135w.
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Folléa, Clémence. "Dickens excentrique : persistances du Dickensien." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016USPCC146.
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Cette thèse examine des trajectoires imaginaires décrites dans l’œuvre de Charles Dickens et à partir d’elle. On y étudie le texte et les réincarnations de Great Expectations (1860-61), Oliver Twist (1837-39) puis The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), trois romans qui, depuis l’ère victorienne, pénètrent l’imaginaire collectif et alimentent des discours divers, toujours influencés par leurs conditions de production. Ainsi, cette thèse pratique des microanalyses de ses sources primaires tout en prêtant attention au contexte de chaque œuvre. Son corpus comprend des adaptations filmiques mais aussi des reprises plus indirectes, telles que des réécritures, séries télévisées ou jeux vidéo faisant apparaître des éléments identifiables comme « dickensiens ». Cet adjectif qualifie des objets imaginaires et des phénomènes culturels dont on s’attache ici à préciser la nature. En particulier, le dickensien et ses persistances sont étudiées au prisme de l’excentricité, un terme souvent utilisé pour évoquer la qualité truculente et insolite des écrits de Dickens. Mais ici, la définition de cette notion est approfondie : l’excentrique, toujours situé entre un centre et ses marges, sert à penser les ambivalences du dickensien. Au gré des contextes socio-culturels et esthétiques dans lesquels il s’incarne, l’imaginaire créé par Dickens nourrit des discours tantôt normatifs et maîtrisables, tantôt subversifs et déroutants. La cartographie chaotique dressée dans ce travail aboutit à une réflexion méthodologique : les persistances du dickensien forment des trajectoires discontinues et imprévisibles, qui contrarient les classements bibliographiques, périodisations et barrières disciplinairesThis thesis looks at the text and afterlives of Great Expectations (1860-61), Oliver Twist (1837-39) and The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), by Charles Dickens. Ever since the Victorian era, these three novels have penetrated our collective imagination and have fed into various kinds of discourses, which are always determined by their conditions of production and reception. Thus, this thesis both performs microanalyses of its primary sources and explores the context in which each work was published. Its corpus includes filmic adaptations as well as more indirect reincarnations, such as rewritings, TV series and videogames featuring elements identifiable as ‘Dickensian’. The latter adjective points to a variety of fictional objects and cultural processes, which are gradually circumscribed throughout this thesis. In particular, the Dickensian and its afterlives are defined in connection with the ‘eccentric’, a term often used to conjure up the colourful and sometimes queer quality of Dickens’s texts. Here, however, a broader definition of this notion is adopted: the eccentric, which always stands halfway between a centre and its margins, is used to examine the many ambiguities of the Dickensian. For, as they move into new aesthetic and socio-cultural contexts, the fictions created by Dickens feed into discourses which can be normative and/or subversive, stereotyped and/or disturbing. My cartography of Dickensian afterlives gradually appears as chaotic, which eventually leads me to reconsider some of my methodological assumptions: Dickens’s fictions move in irregular and unpredictable ways, which often upset bibliographical, periodical and disciplinary boundaries
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Teachout, Jeffrey Frank. "The importance of Charles Dickens in Victorian social reform." Diss., Click here for available full-text of this thesis, 2006. http://library.wichita.edu/digitallibrary/etd/2006/t035.pdf.
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Jönsson, Andreas. "The Importance of Time in Charles Dickens' Hard Times." Thesis, Högskolan i Gävle, Institutionen för humaniora och samhällsvetenskap, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-4017.
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The purpose of the essay is to illustrate the differences in understanding and comprehension of time among the characters in the novel Hard Times. These contrasting differences are then argued to compose a crtisism of the industrial society.
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Crowe, Julian. "Money and character in the novels of Charles Dickens." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15063.
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This thesis discusses the relationship between money and character in the novels of Charles Dickens, concentrating mainly on the later novels, from Dombey & Son onwards. Money is extremely important in Dickens's social criticism, and he is always conscious of money-related motives in his conception of character. However, despite its importance and omnipresence, money ought not to be elevated into the key explanatory principle in Dickens's thought. Dickens has been valued for different qualities over the years. Many who value him as an entertainer with a powerful poetic imagination tend to undervalue his social criticism and moralising, and to treat those aspects as non-essential or as belonging to a different side of his life and work. On the other hand those who value him as social and moral critic have combined this with exaggerated claims of thematic coherence. This thesis suggests that we can dispense with such claims while still regarding Dickens's novels as serious contributions to the moral and social debates of his day. A close consideration will be given to most of the later novels, with the intention of placing the money themes alongside other themes, so as to emphasise the many-sidedness of Dickens's social and moral criticism. Other themes explored in the thesis include marriage and the home, and hypocrisy and self-deception. The thesis seeks to do justice to Dickens's thorough-going ambivalence towards money, and to his capacity for revisiting characters and themes from one work to another. The bias of the thesis is towards the personal and individual, but money is inevitably a social topic. Much consideration is therefore given to Dickens's fictional and non- fictional responses to contemporary social problems and attitudes, and also to material not written by Dickens but published by him in Household Words and All the Year Round.
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Vanfasse, Nathalie. "Normes et déviances dans les romans de Charles Dickens." Paris 4, 2001. http://www.theses.fr/2001PA040136.
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Cette étude se propose d'analyser les notions de norme et de déviance dans les romans de Charles Dickens. Le mot " norme " est entendu ici au sens large de règle communément admise, tandis que le mot " déviance " est compris comme un écart par rapport à la norme. Durant la période victorienne, le poids du conformisme ainsi que l'intérêt très vif manifesté par les Victoriens pour tous les phénomènes de déviance et pour ce qui a trait à la normalité et à ses limites, confèrent aux notions de norme et de déviance une importance fondamentale. Or les romans de Dickens sont particulièrement intéressants de ce point de vue. En effet, les contemporains du romancier le considéraient comme le champion de l'orthodoxie victorienne, tandis que la critique littéraire du vingtième siècle souligne au contraire sa fascination pour les phénomènes de déviance. La présente étude montre que l'écriture de Dickens n'est ni conformiste ni subversive, mais qu'elle dépasse ces catégories réductrices pour explorer toutes les dimensions des normes et déviances de son temps. Cette démonstration s'appuie d'abord sur une étude des liens entre les romans de Dickens et les normes et déviances sociales de l'époque, puis sur une analyse des contraintes extérieures littéraires et artistiques s'exerçant sur cette écriture, et enfin sur un examen des normes et des déviances internes à l'œuvre elle-même et décelables à partir d'une analyse linguistique et stylistique des œuvres, complétée par une approche génétiqueThe aim of this study is to analyse the concepts of norms and deviance in Dickens's novels. " Norms " is broadly understood to mean usual or expected standards, while " deviance " is understood to be a deviation from the norms aforementioned. During the Victorian period, norms and deviance were essential topics, owing to the pressure of conformity and to the cultural obsession of the Victorians with deviance and with the definition and bounds of normality. Dickens's novels are particularly interesting in this respect because the Victorians themselves considered the novelist as a champion of Victorian orthodoxy, while twentieth-century criticism focuses on his fascination for cases of deviance. This study shows that Dickens's writing is in fact too subtle to be fitted into either of these categories, since the novelist explores the many facets of the norms and deviances of his time. This demonstration is based first on an analysis of social norms and deviance in Dickens's work, then on an examination of the external literary and artistic conventions the writer complied with or subverted, and finally on a close study of the norms and deviations which can be discovered within the work itself, by resorting to linguistic and stylistic analyses, as well as to a genetic approach based on a study of the writer's rough drafts, notes, proofs and manuscripts
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Nelms, Jeffrey Charles. "Orality, Literacy, and Character in Bleak House." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1988. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500998/.
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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.
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Colledge, Gary. "Revisiting the sublime history : Dickens, Christianity, and 'The life of Our Lord' /." Thesis, St Andrews, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/422.
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Bouvard, Luc. "Les fils de Dickens : filiation et focalisation dans cinq adaptations cinématographiques des romans de Charles Dickens." Montpellier 3, 2005. http://www.theses.fr/2005MON30062.
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Le personnage du jeune garçon, orphelin de père et de mère, est central dans la fiction de Charles Dickens. Issu de la Révolution Industrielle, les textes dickensiens semblaient réfracter la problématique de la quête oedipienne, que l'on retrouve à d'autres périodes où la fonction paternelle est mise à mal. Cela semble être le cas pour deux moments particuliers du XXe siècle, où les adaptations cinématographiques de ses œuvres furent nombreuses : la Grande Crise des années 30 aux Etats-Unis et l'immédiate après-guerre britannique. Par une mise en parallèle des trois périodes de production et de réception (ère victorienne, années 30 américaines, années 45 britanniques), ce travail vise à inventorier des causes communes à cet intérêt pour Dickens. Si la problématique sociétale semble avoir trouvé une résonance particulière dans les romans à tendance autobiographiques de l'auteur victorien et dans le destin de leurs protagonistes, le cinéma lui fait également écho. En effet, puisque le cinéma se veut le digne héritier du roman victorien, il semble que se joue une tierce filiation dans l'adaptation filmique d'un roman dickensien. Qu'en est-il des cinq adaptations du corpus ? Jouent-elles la carte de la fidélité ou bien sont-elles de belles infidèles ? Qu'en est-il de la filiation dans ces œuvres filmiques ? Offrent-elles une réfraction de l'époque contemporaine ? Entre la filiation et la focalisation, l'un des pôles vise la transmission, la répétition et l'autre révèle le point de vue, la différence. De quelle manière le cinéma adapte-t-il cette problématique ? Ce travail tente d'offrir des réponses à ces questionsThe young orphan boy is a central character in Charles Dickens's fictions. The Dickensian texts, as an expression of the times of the Industrial Revolution seem to reflect the protagonists' oedipal quest, which is found in other times when the paternal function is under strain. Indeed, this also seems to be the case during two specific periods of time in the twentieth century, when screen adaptations of his works were numerous: the American Great Depression and the immediate post World War II period in Britain. By comparing three periods of the production and the reception of works (the Victorian era, the New Deal in the United States, and the post World War II Labour Government in Britain), this study aims at investigating the common grounds for a particular taste in Dickens's novels. If social problems are reflected in the individual destiny of Dickens's protagonists, cinema is also included in this sense. Since the cinema is the real inheritor of the Victorian novel, there seems to be a third relationship in the film adaptations of Dickens's novels. Are the adaptations in this study true to their sources? Or have they reached some sort of autonomy? Do they reflect their own production times? Concerning inheritance or a point of view at the time of their production, there is transmission and repetition, but differences are also revealed. In which ways do the films in question adapt these specific points? This study is an attempt to find suitable answers to these questions
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Ballinger, Gillian J. "Dickens beyond the law : justice in the fiction 1837-1857." Thesis, Keele University, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.273022.
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Simpson, Margaret. "The companion to Hard Times." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 1995. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.295428.
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Waters, Catherine. "The politics of the family in Dickens's fiction." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 1992. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/26450.
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On 12 June 1858, habitual readers of Household Words were amazed to find a proclamation on the front page announcing the editor's from his wife, the differences which had separation and attempting to controvert rumours addressed himself occasioned it. Dickens about to the public under the heading " PERSONAL":
Some domestic trouble of mine, of long-standing, on which I will make no further remark than that it claims to be respected, as being of a sacredly private nature, has lately been brought to an arrangement, which involves no anger or ill-will of any kind, and the whole origin, progress, and surrounding circumstances of which have been, throughout, within the knowledge of my children. It is amicably composed, and its details have now but to be forgotten by those concerned in it. By some means, arising out of wickedness, or out of folly, or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been made the occasion of misrepresentations, most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel - involving, not only me, but innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I have no knowledge, if indeed, they have any existence - and so widely spread, that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines, by whom some touch of the breath of these slanders will not have passed, like an unwholesome air.
The simile of pollution recalls the imagery of disease spread by noxious winds, so prevalent in Bleak House, and indicates the strength and vehemence of Dickens's indignation. But according to his friend Percy Fitzgerald, the belief that all his readers had heard of some slander concerning his domestic trouble was a "delusion" on Dickens's part:
People were all but bewild ered and almost stunne d, so unexpe cted was the revelat ion. Everyone was for the most part in supreme ignorance of what the document could possibly refer to.
As a result, Dickens's declared wish, in writing this document, to "circulate the Truth," was overshadowed by the titillating revelation made to otherwise uninformed people that the man held to be "so peculiarly a writer of home life, a delineator of household gods, "3 was embroiled in a domestic scandal.
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Fitzsimmons, John Francis. "The construction of meaning in narrative : Dickens and the stereotype /." Title page, contents and abstract only, 1995. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09PH/09phf562.pdf.
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Racadio, D. S. "The comic, the grotesque and the uncanny in Charles Dickens." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.280064.
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Coste, Marie-Amélie. "L'être et le paraître dans les romans de Charles Dickens." Paris 4, 2005. http://www.theses.fr/2005PA040198.
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Cette étude se fonde sur un trait de l'écriture dickensienne, à savoir, un usage particulièrement fréquent du sens littéral. L'objectif de ce travail est de démontrer que la distinction entre sens littéral et sens figuré n'est pas seulement une question de jeu de mots, mais une opposition fondamentale qui sous-tend les trois niveaux du mot, de la fiction et de l'être et indique une quête problématique de la nature propre de ce qui est. Or la notion de littéral revêt une importance d'autant plus grande qu'elle n'est pas une préoccupation du seul Dickens, mais s'inscrit au cœur de débats propres à l'époque victorienne. Prenant en compte le contexte victorien, cette recherche débute par les phénomènes de " défiguration " observables dans la fiction dickensienne, c'est-à-dire l'effort de distinction radicale entre sens littéral et sens figuré. Cette distinction radicale, toutefois, se trouve fondamentalement remise en cause par les moments de l'œuvre dickensienne où sens littéral et sens figuré se confondent. Mais la suggestion fantastique et absurde, née d'une telle confusion, n'envahit jamais le texte de manière irréversible. Elle demeure de l'ordre du possible, du problème à résoudre dans un troisième type de rapport entre le littéral et le figuré, fusionnel celui-ci. Cela est rendu possible par la sympathie qui permet de dépasser les dichotomies stériles, forme une issue au désespoir et à l'angoisse du doute critique, donnant à l'être l'espoir d'une nouvelle croyance plus lucideThis study is based on a typical trait of Dickens's writing – the frequent use of literal meanings. This work aims to show that the distinction between literal and figurative meanings is not simply a matter of puns, but an essential opposition underlying the three levels of word, fiction and being, and revealing a problematic quest for the nature of what is. The notion of the literal appears as all the more important as it does not concern Dickens only, but is at the core of debates particular to the Victorian period. Taking into account the Victorian context, this research starts with the theme of “disfiguring” present in Dickens's novels, in other words with the attempted radical distinction between literal and figurative meanings. The latter, however, is challenged at those places, in Dickens's work, where literal and figurative meanings are confused. But the summoning of the fantastic and the absurd, which arises out of this confusion, never invades the text irrevocably. It remains a potentiality, an issue to be resolved in a third, harmonious way to envisage the relation between the literal and the figurative. This harmony is made possible by the notion of sympathy, which overcomes sterile dichotomies, allows an escape out of the despair and anxiety caused by critical doubt, giving human beings the hope of a more lucid form of belief
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Ebelthite, Candice Axell. ""The wife of Lucifer" : women and evil in Charles Dickens." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002231.
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This thesis examines Dickens's presentation of evil women. In the course of my reading I discovered that most of the evil women in his novels are mothers, or mother-figures, a finding which altered the nature of my interpretation and led to closer examination of these characters, rather than the prostitutes and criminals who may have been viewed negatively by Nineteenth century society and thereby condemned as evil. Among the many unsympathetically portrayed mothers and mother-figures in Dickens's works, the three that are most interesting are Lady Dedlock, Miss Havisham, and Mrs Skewton. Madame Defarge initiates the discussion, however, as a seminal figure among the many evil women in the novels. Psychoanalytical and socio-historic readings grounded in Nineteenth century conceptions of womanhood provide background material for this thesis. Though useful and informative, however, these areas of study are not sufficient in themselves. The theory that shapes the arguments of this thesis is defined by Steven Cohan, who argues strongly that the demand for psychological coherence as a requisite of character obscures the imaginative power of character as textual construct, and who both refutes and develops character theory as it is argued by Baruch Hochman. Cohan's theory is also finally closer to that outlined by Thomas Docherty, who provides a complex reading of character as ultimately "unknowable".
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Major, David. "Charles Dickens & the Breakdown of Society's Institutions for Children." TopSCHOLAR®, 1986. https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/2563.
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As a social critic, Charles Dickens carries an attack against the mistreatment of children throughout his career. At first reacting in the defense of wronged children, he develops a view of the process of social breakdown that results from mistreating children. Adults fai3 in their duty to children because they fail to recognize the needs of children as children and even fail to recognize the human rights of children. This mistreatment is implemented by social institutions that are supposedly dedicated to caring for children. The family fails to bring up the child with love and care. The child's education rarely teaches him anything of use and often abuses him. An orphaned child, if he has no friends or relatives to take him in, may receive empty gestures of support from an institution but most often does not and is ignored or openly mistreated by society. Indeed, whether cast upon themselves or not, most of the children in Dickens have lost one or both parents, and this loss symbolizes the lack of care they receive. In his early novels, Dickens uses philanthropy to bring about happy endings, and in later works philanthropy continues to be the only alternative to the failed social institutions; however, Dickens later sees that society's failure is too great to be neatly corrected by individual philanthropy. In destroying its young citizens, society is slowly destroying itself. This study examines the breakdown of the family, education, and care for orphans in Dickens's novels Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, and Great Expectations.
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Daly, Robyn Anne. "Asleep in a glass coffin: fairy tales as illuminating attitudes to women in the novels of Charles Dickens." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002270.
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The field of research of this thesis covers three main areas: the novels of Charles Dickens; fairy tales and storytelling; and notions of women as reflected in feminist literary theory. A reading of selected novels by Dickens provides the primary source. That he copiously drew on fairy tales has been explored in such notable works as Harry Stone's, but the thesis concentrates on Dickens 's propensity in his creation of female protagonists to give them a voice which is vivified through fairy tale. The analysis of fairy story through narrative theory and feminist literary theory functions as the basis of an exploration of the role female narrative voices play in a reading of the novels which reveals a more sympathetic vision of the feminine than has been observed hitherto. The context of this study is Victorian attitudes to women and that modem criticism has not sufficiently acknowledged Dickens's insight into of the condition of women; much of this is discovered through an examination of his use of fairy tale wherein the woman is bearer of imaginative and emotional capacities magically bestowed. The research aims to counter the view of Dickens's novels as being sexist, through the iIluminatory characteristics of fairy tale. Dickens activates his women characters by means of their often being tellers of tales replete with fairy tale imagery, and their tales are almost always seminal to the novelist's moral purpose.
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Lane, Cara. "Moments in the life of literature /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9458.
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