英國文學(xué)--狄更斯創(chuàng)作綜述

1、the creation of works by charles dickens班級：09級英語二班 學(xué)號：090502011222姓名：石未芳 out of the vast of victorian novelists, the three greatest, dickens, thackeray, and george eliot, will be selected for special study. the first of these to achieve fame was charles dickens. this man, the representative of engli

2、sh critical realism, who was to become a great portrayer of child life, had a sad, painful childhood. due to his father's imprison of debt, he had little formal education, but managed to make up for the deficiency through avid and extensive reading on his own. still later he learned the shorthan

3、d and became a reporter on parliamentary proceedings. then he wrote for a pictorial book, the pickwick papers (1837), which became immediately popular and started him off on his lifelong writing career. dickens was a prolific writer he wrote 20-odd novels, not to say the host of his other writings t

4、hat came out in print. reading him is always an enjoyable experience. his effect on the readers can be such that they feel instantly that they are in the presence of greatness. for example, the pickwick papers gives a rather comprehensive picture of the english society of dickens1 time, and the blen

5、ding of humour with satire, plus the brilliant portraits of pickwick and sam weller make the book deservedly the first important work of dickens. in his works, dickens gives up a most vivid picture of the everyday life of the ordinary people of his time. he created a large number of characters, well

6、 drawn, full of life and unforgettable. he had suffered so bitterly himself as a child and had seen so much evil that he burned with the desire to fight it to the end. in many ways, of course, he still belonged to his age and showed the limits of petty-bourgeois outlook. while presenting a truthful

7、account of the hardships borne by the poor people, he believed that a hard-working and honest man could yet achieve his little personal happiness under capitalism. he criticized the vices of capitalist society, but failed to see the necessity of a bitter struggle of the oppressed against their oppre

8、ssors. in spite of his weakness, however, there still remains the great writer and great man, the man who loved the common people so humanely and understandingly. that is why dickens has been a favourite writer with the people of the world.dickens9 career can be roughly split into two broad sub-peri

9、ods. the first of these runs from the beginning through 1850 when he published dombey and son. here is seen a dickens smiling through his pages. not that there are on evil, cruelty and suffering, and tension; his novels reveal plenty of these. think of the debtors9 prison in lihle dorrit, david copp

10、eifield and the pickwick papers ,the poor little boy oliver asking for more in a workhouse, the starvation of the pupils in a boarding school in nicholas nickleby, the death of the grandfather and granddaughter in theold curiosity shop ,the suffering of the little mistreated boy in david copperfield

11、 (1850), and the terror of the gordon riots in barnaby rudge (1841)all these offersufficient evidence that there is a good deal of pain and cruelty in english society then. though change is just around the corner, the system is to dickens still good and capable of becoming better. from the end of th

12、e first period to the end of his life, however, the readers tend to detect a dickens pulling a long face and drowning profusely. he becomes more and more gloomy. his mood change has to do with the "progress” of the country toward the barbaric phase of capitalist development. the utilitarian dis

13、regard for human feelings and for the value of imagination as represented in hard times, the ruthlessness of the french aristocrats in a tale of two cities, the gross injustice of the english legal system in bleak house, and the ambient gloom that hangs over the prison of the nmarshalseah(an apt met

14、aphor for england as a whole) in little dorritthese are so repulsive and repugnant that the readershave reason to believe that dickens is sorely frustrated and even despairs toward the latter part of his life to see the country he has loved so much heading toward some ominous direction. what makes h

15、im feel very bad is man's cruelty to his fellow creatures. he thinks of his generation as a wicked one. in the first past of his career he seems to have faith in the charitable spirit of human beings, and portrays benevolent characters with warmth and enthusiasm. but as the country moves into th

16、e middle and latter part of the century, life becomes worse and dickens feels depressed. the later phase of his career sees him painting a social picture disconcertingly dismal and agonizing. works like dombey and son, bleak house, hard times, little dorrit, great expectations. our mutual friend. ma

17、rtin chuzzlewit, and half-done edwin drood are all good illustrations.the dickensian world is almost shakespearean. it is a world thronged with the diverse specimens of humanity; it is a world where the readers can get a bird's-eye view of the panorama of english life. all the different decades

18、overarching the whole historical period of his creative life get their phase of description and offer a historical backdrop for his writing. thus dickens1 artistic technique can be summarized as below:1. dickens has a tendency to depict the character. not only are the major characters in his novels

19、very carefully delineate and given distinctive in dividual characteristics, but in almost every one of his twenty-odd works of fiction we inevitably come across several rather minor figures who create in the readers mind strong impressions of their personalities so that they are remembered long afte

20、rwards. the secret of such success lies first of all in the novelist giving to his characters exactly the actions and words that fit them in their positions in life and in their given environments, but sometimes the characters become lively and living personages simply because the author gives them

21、a peculiar habit, manner, behaviour, dress, and catches phrase of his or her own, and it is these peculiarities that light up their individual traits and make them vivid and real. in the whole history of english fiction there are few writers who have created such a great number of living portraits i

22、n their fictional characters as has dickens. some of dickens characters are really such htypical characters under typical circumstances that they become proverbial or are representative of a whole group of similar persons, as for instance m匚 podsnap and podsnappery, bounderby and gradgrind, domdey,

23、monsieur and madame defarge, micawber and uriah heep. and it is also the evident of the fact that dickens was under the influence of ben jonsorts comedies of humours, in which each character has his or her own peculiar humour. he also loves to instill life into inanimate things and to compare animat

24、e beings to inanimate things. for example, in hard times he compares the up and down movement of engines in a factory to the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness, and the smoke in the air above to snakes trailing themselves for ever and eve匚 in martin chuzzlewit he compares the hypoc

25、ritical pecksniff to a direction post, which always points out the direction for other people to in but it never moves an inch towards the direction it is pointing.2. dickens is highly critical of his age. social criticism is a hallmark of all his works. he is supremely human and keenly sensitive to

26、 the problems of his age and the plight of his people. as mentioned earlier on, he spearheads his citing attacks toward english law and the prison system. dickens frequently achieves the penetrating effect of satire with the successful use of irony or obvious exaggeration, generally applied to objec

27、ts of ridicule, such as you find in the portrayal of mi; bounderby the boastful banker or of mr. pecksniff the arch-hypocrite. touches of broad humour are sometimes employed by dickens to enliven a whole scene or light up a whole character, as in the case of the all-too-innocent cousin volumnia in b

28、leak house or of mr. micawber in david copperfield who is always expecting something to hturn up, reading any of his novels, one will understand the fury that the author feels and the emotional intensity with which he deals with these subjects. the court of chancery, topical for the 1850s, is the ob

29、ject of his acrid satire in such works as his bleak house. the evil of middle class philistinism, of which utilitarianism constituted an integral part, is thoroughly exposed in hard times. for the ills of the british parliamentary system and the elections and representative government, dickens has n

30、othing but contemp匸 nor does he have any faith and trust in philanthropy and evangelical religion or in boy organized social reform. the best testimony of all these is the extensive coverage he gives in his works to the number of social abuses and the other hand, he stands forever on the side of the

31、 poor and feels adamant about the just and righteous nature of their struggles for survival. his descriptions of the chartist movement and the french revolution are both good illustrations here.3. a third artistic device that is often effectively used by dickens is the painting of a picture of patho

32、s about some character deserving our sympathy, as with nancy in oliver twist or little nell in the old curiosity shop. pathos is a distinctive quality in dickens's writings. though we may feel it affected, the readers of dickens time had great love of pathetic scenes as they were fond of melodra

33、ma which were very popular in their time and which are a kind of naively sensational entertainment with the main character either excessively virtuous or excessively evil. dickens knew what his readers liked, and he loved to avail himself of every opportunity to appeal to the emotions of his readers

34、. the archetypal dickensian hero or heroine is often an orphan or a child whose parents, though still alive, are as well as dead to them. there is in these protagonists a visible silhouette of young dickens suffering in a blacking shoe factory or visiting his father in a debtors1 prison. they find t

35、hemselves in a heartless world, without family love and any sense of security, ignored by society, and struggling against malignant odds for survival. they need other care and attention.4. dickens was essentially an intuitive artist. spontaneity was his trade mark. even when he becomes more consciou

36、s in his structural planning, he never lost this spinal quality of his creative genius. generally, his early works were more spontaneous than his later ones. such early works as sketches by boz(1836) and the pickwick papers portray a loosely linked series of incidents and adventures without much of

37、a plot. in his novels there are often threads of story beside the major one, and these threads are generally very loosely woven together. but this sometimes becomes a virtue rather than a defect for these minor threads of story frequently are responsible for the introduction of some very vivid and l

38、iving characters and for the broad panoramic view of the society which is such an outstanding feature in many of dickens1 novels. but on the whole dickens seems to love a complicated and involved plot which envelopes the whole story in mystery until the fog is lifted at the end of the novel, and thi

39、s most artificial and laborious plot construction usually detracts from the realism of story-telling. then, in almost every one of dickens1 novels there is the happy ending which in some cases may come naturally enough yet in some others cannot be arrived at without a complicated story or an artific

40、ially mysterious atmosphere. on the other hand, the ever-present happy ending points to dickens1 optimism which is an admirable thing for a critical realist because that means he still has his hopes after seeing the gloomy world all around him, although the frequent unconvincingness of the happy end

41、ing also shows up the novelist' inevitable shortcoming in his failure to see the proper way out of the terrible social mess-taken as a whole, dickens's novels offer a most complete and realistic picture of the english bourgeois society of his age. his works are found types representing all s

42、trata of the british society. he created unforgettable characters typifying the vices of the bourgeoisie, such as the greedy ralph nickleby, the hypocrite pecksniff, the purse-proud dombey, the hard-headed gradgrind, and a host of others. while criticizing the rich, dickens presented a picture of th

43、e people's sufferings under capitalism. the decaying petty bourgeoisie and the rising working class were depicted by dickens as victims of capitalist greed and exploitation. dickens's social criticism cannot be understood without taking into account the mass movement of the working class, chartism. his works are a reflection of