This new, corpus-driven approach to the study of language and style of literary texts makes use of the Dickens' 4.6 million-word corpus for a detailed examination of patterns of lexical collocations. It offers new insights into Dickens' linguistic innovation, together with a nuanced understanding of his use of language to achieve stylistic ends. At the centre of the study is a close analysis of the two narratives in Bleak House , read as a focal point for consideration of Dickens' stylistic development through his whole writing life.
This new, corpus-driven approach to the study of language and style of literary texts makes use of the Dickens' 4.6 million-word corpus for a detailed examination of patterns of lexical collocations. It offers new insights into Dickens' linguistic innovation, together with a nuanced understanding of his use of language to achieve stylistic ends. At the centre of the study is a close analysis of the two narratives in Bleak House , read as a focal point for consideration of Dickens' stylistic development through his whole writing life.
This new, corpus-driven approach to the study of language and style of literary texts makes use of the Dickens' 4.6 million-word corpus for a detailed examination of patterns of lexical collocations. It offers new insights into Dickens' linguistic innovation, together with a nuanced understanding of his use of language to achieve stylistic ends. At the centre of the study is a close analysis of the two narratives in Bleak House , read as a focal point for consideration of Dickens' stylistic development through his whole writing life.
Charles Dickens was an English writer and social critic, widely recognized as a literary genius. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. G. K. Chesterton took great interest in the literature of Charles Dickens, writing several books concerning his life and his works: Charles Dickens – Biographical Sketch Charles Dickens – Critical Study Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens
In Dickens’s Hyperrealism, John R. Reed examines certain features of Dickens’s style to demonstrate that the Inimitable consciously resisted what came to be known as realism in the genre of the novel. Dickens used some techniques associated with realism, such as description and metonymy, to subvert the purposes usually associated with it. Reed argues that Dickens used such devices as personification and present-tense narration, which are anathema to the realist approach. He asserts that Dickens preferred a heightened reality, not realism. And, unlike the realism which seeks to mask authorial control of how readers read his novels, Dickens wanted to demonstrate, first openly, and later in his career more subtly, his command over his narratives. This book opens a new avenue for investigating Dickens’s mastery of his art and his awareness of its literary context. In addition, it reopens the whole issue of realism as a definition and examines the variety of genres that coexisted in the Victorian period.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Problem of 'Edwin Drood': A Study in the Methods of Dickens" by W. Robertson Sir Nicoll. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
This thesis is an exploration of Dickens' style in one early and one late novel. I have restricted it because of space to a consideration of Nicholas Nickleby and Our Mutual Friend , with only passing references to other novels, but I hope that, within its limited scope, it may shed some light on Dickens' general development from the early to the late novels. I believe that the oscillations of critical taste, from the vogue for the early novels at the beginning of this century to the vogue for the later ones begun by Edmund Wilson, mislead us about the nature of Dickens' achievement. I -. attempt to refute the statement by A.O.J. Cockshut, in his chapter on Edwin Drood in Dickens and the Twentieth Century : "The distinction I make between the early and the late novels is in no way original; ... In books like Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby we have a spirited, macabre and humorous development of the tradition of English melodrama. Grotesque fantasy of plot and character .... But in Little Dorrit , Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend , we have symbolic comment on society ... On the whole there is little mingling of the two methods." Such a polarisa tion of Dickens' achievement leads to the undervaluing of Nicholas Nickleby and to the misinterpretation of Our Mutual Friend . In chapters on character, plot and the influence of melodrama I attempt to show the essential continuity of the two works and, in the final chapter, to explain where I think the real difference lies: in the development of Dickens' language, in the growth from the similes of Nicholas Nickleby to the metaphors of Our Mutual Friend . It is this development which has led to the artificial critical division between the early theatrical Dickens and the latet prose poet-and it is these two characters whom I try to reconcile.
