Choice in Charles Dickens's Later Novels: The Spectator's Art

Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-90-04-52849-9
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 234, 290 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 623 g

Reihe: Costerus New Series

We read the book, and the book is reading us. In his later novels, Charles Dickens uses the interaction between characters and their audiences within the fiction to dramatise his growing understanding of the pivotal role of spectatorship and choice in a more democratic society. Egotists of all stripes, intent on bending the world to their singular will, would appropriate the power of spectatorship by taking command of the detachment necessary for choice. Dickens’s pluralistic art of sameness and difference redefines that detachment, and liberates choice both inside and outside the novels, for the relationship between characters and their audiences within the narratives actually inscribes our own relationship with them in the performance of reading, a reflective doubling of the fiction upon the reader across time with moral consequences for our spectatorship of our own lives.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Easley, Keith

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Einzelne Autoren: Monographien & Biographien
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren

Über Autor(innen)

Keith Easley (PhD 2010, Aichi Shukutoku University) has taught at Nanzan and Aichi Shukutoku Universities in Japan. He is the author of Dickens and Bakhtin: Authoring and Dialogism in Dickens's Novels, 1849-1861 (2013).