Dickens And The Stenographic Mind

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Dickens and the Stenographic Mind

Author : Hugo Bowles
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192564331
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis Dickens and the Stenographic Mind by : Hugo Bowles

Download or read book Dickens and the Stenographic Mind written by Hugo Bowles and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Initially described by Dickens as a 'savage stenographic mystery', shorthand was to become an essential and influential part of his toolkit as a writer. In this ground-breaking interdisciplinary study, Hugo Bowles tells the story of Dickens's stenographic journey from his early encounters with the 'despotic' shorthand symbols of Gurney's Brachygraphy in 1828 to his lifelong commitment to shorthand for reporting, letter writing, copying, and note-taking. Drawing on empirical evidence from Dickens's shorthand notebooks, Dickens and the Stenographic Mind forensically explores Dickens's unique ability to write in two graphic codes, offering an original critique of the impact of shorthand on Dickens's mental processing of language. The author uses insights from morphology, phonetics, and the psychology of reading to show how Dickens's biscriptal habits created a unique stenographic mindset that was then translated into novel forms of creative writing. The volume argues that these new scriptal arrangements, which include phonetic speech, stenographic patterns of letters in individual words, phonaesthemes, and literary representations of shorthand-related acts of reading and writing, created reading puzzles that bound Dickens and his readers together in a new form of stenographic literacy. Clearly written and cogently argued, Dickens and the Stenographic Mind not only opens up new evidence from a little known area of Dickens's professional life to expert scrutiny, but is highly relevant to a number of important debates in Victorian studies including orality and literacy in the nineteenth century, the role of voice and voicing in Dickens's writing process, his relationship with his readers, and his various writing personae as law reporter, sketch-writer, journalist, and novelist.

Dickens and Demolition

Author : Joanna Hofer-Robinson
Publisher : EUP
ISBN 13 : 9781474420983
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis Dickens and Demolition by : Joanna Hofer-Robinson

Download or read book Dickens and Demolition written by Joanna Hofer-Robinson and published by EUP. This book was released on 2018 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intro -- List of Il lustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Series Editor's Preface -- Abbreviations and a Note on Editions -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 Charles Dickens and Metropolitan Improvements -- Chapter 2 Sets and the City: Staging London and Oliver Twist -- Chapter 3 Dickensian Afterlives and the Demolition of Field Lane -- Chapter 4 Paperwork and Philanthropy: Dickens's Involvement in Metropolitan Improvement -- Chapter 5 From Sanitary Reform to Cultural Memory: The Case of Jacob's Island -- Coda -- Archival Sources and a Note on Method -- Select Bibliography -- Index

The One, Other, and Only Dickens

Author : Garrett Stewart
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501730126
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The One, Other, and Only Dickens by : Garrett Stewart

Download or read book The One, Other, and Only Dickens written by Garrett Stewart and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart casts new light on those delirious wrinkles of wording that are one of the chief pleasures of Dickens’s novels but that go regularly unnoticed in Dickensian criticism: the linguistic infrastructure of his textured prose. Stewart, in effect, looks over the reader’s shoulder in shared fascination with the local surprises of Dickensian phrasing and the restless undertext of his storytelling. For Stewart, this phrasal undercurrent attests both to Dickens’s early immersion in Shakespearean sonority and, at the same time, to the effect of Victorian stenography, with the repressed phonetics of its elided vowels, on the young author’s verbal habits long after his stint as a shorthand Parliamentary reporter. To demonstrate the interplay and tension between narrative and literary style, Stewart draws out two personas within Dickens: the Inimitable Boz, master of plot, social panorama, and set-piece rhetorical cadences, and a verbal alter ego identified as the Other, whose volatile and intensively linguistic, even sub-lexical presence is felt throughout Dickens’s fiction. Across examples by turns comic, lyric, satiric, and melodramatic from the whole span of Dickens’s fiction, the famously recognizable style is heard ghosted in a kind of running counterpoint ranging from obstreperous puns to the most elusive of internal echoes: effects not strictly channeled into the service of overall narrative drive, but instead generating verbal microplots all their own. One result is a new, ear-opening sense of what it means to take seriously Graham Greene’s famous passing mention of Dickens’s "secret prose."

Collaborative Dickens

Author : Melisa Klimaszewski
Publisher : Ohio University Press
ISBN 13 : 0821446738
Total Pages : 406 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis Collaborative Dickens by : Melisa Klimaszewski

Download or read book Collaborative Dickens written by Melisa Klimaszewski and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1850 to 1867, Charles Dickens produced special issues (called “numbers”) of his journals Household Words and All the Year Round, which were released shortly before Christmas each year. In Collaborative Dickens, Melisa Klimaszewski undertakes the first comprehensive study of these Christmas numbers. She argues for a revised understanding of Dickens as an editor who, rather than ceaselessly bullying his contributors, sometimes accommodated contrary views and depended upon multivocal narratives for his own success. Klimaszewski uncovers connections among and between the stories in each Christmas collection. She thus reveals ongoing conversations between the works of Dickens and his collaborators on topics important to the Victorians, including race, empire, supernatural hauntings, marriage, disability, and criminality. Stories from Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and understudied women writers such as Amelia B. Edwards and Adelaide Anne Procter interact provocatively with Dickens’s writing. By restoring links between stories from as many as nine different writers in a given year, Klimaszewski demonstrates that a respect for the Christmas numbers’ plural authorship and intertextuality results in a new view of the complexities of collaboration in the Victorian periodical press and a new appreciation for some of the most popular texts Dickens published.

Mother Night

Author : Kurt Vonnegut
Publisher : Dial Press
ISBN 13 : 0440339073
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (43 download)

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Book Synopsis Mother Night by : Kurt Vonnegut

Download or read book Mother Night written by Kurt Vonnegut and published by Dial Press. This book was released on 2009-08-11 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer . . . a zany but moral mad scientist.”—Time Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense. American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all. “A great artist.”—Cincinnati Enquirer “A shaking up in the kaleidoscope of laughter . . . Reading Vonnegut is addictive!”—Commonweal

In Dialogue with Dickens

Author : Rosemarie Bodenheimer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192886762
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis In Dialogue with Dickens by : Rosemarie Bodenheimer

Download or read book In Dialogue with Dickens written by Rosemarie Bodenheimer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in the form of a back-and-forth dialogue between the two authors, this book is about the relationship between feeling and thinking in Dickens's novels. It presents Dickens as a psychological thinker, whose generative thought may be conscious, unconscious, half-conscious, or in transit between one state and another. This Dickens is always in live process, improvizing from one monthly number to the next, subtly revizing as he goes, shifting moods, tenses, and tones from one paragraph or sentence to the next, as what he writes sparks off what he suddenly, newly, thinks. The chapters approach this inquiry through close readings of chosen passages, including studies of telling revisions in Dickens's manuscripts that reveal the power of his deepened second thoughts. They also draw on selected moments from his personal letters and prefaces when these more casual writings prove to be sketches or rehearsals for thoughts and feelings that achieve new life when they are transformed into fiction. The book concentrates on four novels of his great middle period: Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit, while making excursions into earlier and later Dickens novels, notably A Tale of Two Cities and Our Mutual Friend. The experiment of intense but informal conversation between the authors also models the relationship between feeling and thinking in the act of reading and responding to powerful moves in fiction.

Dickens and Victorian Psychology

Author : Tyson Stolte
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192858424
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis Dickens and Victorian Psychology by : Tyson Stolte

Download or read book Dickens and Victorian Psychology written by Tyson Stolte and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-11 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind positions Charles Dickens's fiction in the midst of Victorian psychological debate, tracking Dickens's increasing reliance over the course of his career on the introspective mode, those moments--from free indirect discourse to first-person narration--in which Dickens attempts to represent the inner view of his characters' minds. In the middle of the nineteenth century, introspection remained the central investigative method for dualist psychologies, theories that tied the mind's immortality to its immateriality. Because those psychologies found evidence of the mind's ontological difference from the body in the subjective experience of consciousness, this book argues that the moments of inwardness in Dickens's fiction, in both their form and their content, constitute efforts to resist the encroachment of psycho-physiology by making a case for the mind's transcendence of the body. Yet Dickens and Victorian Psychology also shows the consequences of a material psychology's appropriation of such an inward view--as well as the results of the efforts by psycho-physiologists to redefine the terminology of a mainstream dualism--by tracing the ambiguities and contradictions that find their way into Dickens's representations of the mind. In these ways, this book reveals an overlooked context for Dickens's experiments with narrative point of view and broadens our understanding of the strategies that a material psychology used to assuage the anxieties of those who saw psycho-physiology as a threat to immortality.

Dickens's Style

Author : Daniel Tyler
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107244935
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (72 download)

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Book Synopsis Dickens's Style by : Daniel Tyler

Download or read book Dickens's Style written by Daniel Tyler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Dickens, generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age, was known as 'The Inimitable', not least for his distinctive style of writing. This collection of twelve essays addresses the essential but often overlooked subject of Dickens's style, with each essay discussing a particular feature of his writing. All the essays consider Dickens's style conceptually, and they read it closely, demonstrating the ways it works on particular occasions. They show that style is not simply an aesthetic quality isolated from the deepest meanings of Dickens's fiction, but that it is inextricably involved with all kinds of historical, political and ideological concerns. Written in a lively and accessible manner by leading Dickens scholars, the collection ranges across all Dickens's writing, including the novels, journalism and letters.

New Approaches to Shorthand

Author : Hannah Boeddeker
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3111382699
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (113 download)

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Book Synopsis New Approaches to Shorthand by : Hannah Boeddeker

Download or read book New Approaches to Shorthand written by Hannah Boeddeker and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-10-07 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Variously identified as an art, a technology, and a professional prerequisite, forms of shorthand have been in use from Antiquity to the modern day. Far from a niche corner in manuscript studies, shorthand represents an almost global phenomenon that has touched upon many aspects of everyday life and of scholarship. Due to its immediate illegibility, however, and the daunting task of decipherment, shorthand has long been neglected as a research object in its own right. The immense quantity of extant and unread shorthand manuscripts has been downplayed, as has the technology's place in cultures of learning, religious devotion, court practice, parliamentary procedure, authorial composition, corporate life, public and private writing, and the academy. As the first ever peer-reviewed volume on the subject, this book presents a much-needed introduction to shorthand, its history, and its disparate historiography, alongside eight contributions by shorthand specialists that showcase some of the many lines of inquiry that shorthand inspires across a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. For readers with a vested interest in shorthand, this volume provides a range of approaches to shorthand in the Latin West, from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, upon which to orient, substantiate, and inform their own work. For general readers, this publication invites scholars to consider ways in which historically overlooked or underestimated forms of writing facilitated a variety of writing cultures in different contexts, periods, and languages.

Mark Twain's Autobiography

Author : Mark Twain
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 398 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Mark Twain's Autobiography by : Mark Twain

Download or read book Mark Twain's Autobiography written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Romances of Free Trade

Author : Ayse Celikkol
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199877629
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (998 download)

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Book Synopsis Romances of Free Trade by : Ayse Celikkol

Download or read book Romances of Free Trade written by Ayse Celikkol and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-03 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring works by Walter Scott, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and their lesser-known contemporaries, Romances of Free Trade historicizes globalization as it traces the perception of dissolving borders and declining national sovereignty back into the nineteenth century. The book offers a new account of the cultural work of romance in nineteenth-century Britain. Çelikkol argues that novelists and playwrights employed this genre to represent a radically new historical formation: the emergence of a globalized free-market economy. In previous centuries, the British state had pursued an economic policy that chose domestic goods over foreign ones. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, liberal economists maintained that commodity traffic across national borders should move outside the purview of the state, a position and practice that began to take hold as the century progressed. Amid the transformation, Britons pondered the vertiginous effects of rapidly accelerating economic circulation. Would patriotic attachment to the homeland dissolve along with the preference for domestic goods? How would the nation and the empire fare if commerce became uncontrollable? The literary genre of romance, characterized by protagonists who drift in lawless spaces, played a meaningful role in addressing such pressing questions. From the figure of the smuggler to the episodic plot structure, romance elements in fiction and drama narrated and made tangible the sprawling global markets and fluid capital that were reshaping the world. In addition to clear-eyed close readings of nineteenth-century novels and plays, Çelikkol draws on the era's major economic theorists, figures like Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, to vividly illustrate the manifold ways the romance genre engaged with these emerging financial changes.

Minor Creatures

Author : Ivan Kreilkamp
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022657637X
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (265 download)

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Book Synopsis Minor Creatures by : Ivan Kreilkamp

Download or read book Minor Creatures written by Ivan Kreilkamp and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-11-07 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, richly-drawn social fiction became one of England’s major cultural exports. At the same time, a surprising companion came to stand alongside the novel as a key embodiment of British identity: the domesticated pet. In works by authors from the Brontës to Eliot, from Dickens to Hardy, animals appeared as markers of domestic coziness and familial kindness. Yet for all their supposed significance, the animals in nineteenth-century fiction were never granted the same fullness of character or consciousness as their human masters: they remain secondary figures. Minor Creatures re-examines a slew of literary classics to show how Victorian notions of domesticity, sympathy, and individuality were shaped in response to the burgeoning pet class. The presence of beloved animals in the home led to a number of welfare-minded political movements, inspired in part by the Darwinian thought that began to sprout at the time. Nineteenth-century animals may not have been the heroes of their own lives but, as Kreilkamp shows, the history of domestic pets deeply influenced the history of the English novel.

Dickensian Affects

Author : Joshua Gooch
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000727491
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (7 download)

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Book Synopsis Dickensian Affects by : Joshua Gooch

Download or read book Dickensian Affects written by Joshua Gooch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity, Joshua Gooch argues that Dickens’s novels offer models of feeling that illuminate the dissensions that accompany life’s precariousness under capitalism. By examining the role of violence, anxiety, surprise, and suspense in Dickens’s novels, Gooch explores how they represent and shape emotions to create rhythms specific to their historical moment. To unearth Dickensian affects, Gooch examines how some of Dickens’s novels yoke elements in their difference to signal different kinds and ways of feeling, what he terms affective form. This patterning of elements links a text’s ways of feeling to its conjuncture and locates lines of flight that allow its representations of emotion to become something else. The violence of Oliver Twist links its satire of the New Poor Law to the post-abolition period of apprenticeship in the West Indies. The pervasive anxiety of The Old Curiosity Shop links Nell’s journey to arguments economic inequality focused on questions of inheritance and land reform. The surprise of David Copperfield binds its interests in questions of character and trust to Britain’s professional world and credit markets. And the suspense of Great Expectations gestures toward a sense of shame and demand for new models of masculine character also seen in the Volunteer rifle militias. Dickensian Affects argues that for Dickens, questions of feeling reveal the precarity of feeling itself. For Dickens, to feel is to know the possibility of feeling otherwise.

Blindness and Writing

Author : Heather Tilley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107194210
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Blindness and Writing by : Heather Tilley

Download or read book Blindness and Writing written by Heather Tilley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative and important study, Heather Tilley examines the huge shifts that took place in the experience and conceptualisation of blindness during the nineteenth century, and demonstrates how new writing technologies for blind people had transformative effects on literary culture. Considering the ways in which visually-impaired people used textual means to shape their own identities, the book argues that blindness was also a significant trope through which writers reflected on the act of crafting literary form. Supported by an illuminating range of archival material (including unpublished letters from Wordsworth's circle, early ophthalmologic texts, embossed books, and autobiographies) this is a rich account of blind people's experience, and reveals the close, and often surprising personal engagement that canonical writers had with visual impairment. Drawing on the insights of disability studies and cultural phenomenology, Tilley highlights the importance of attending to embodied experience in the production and consumption of texts.

The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens

Author : Pete Orford
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1119697530
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (196 download)

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Book Synopsis The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens by : Pete Orford

Download or read book The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens written by Pete Orford and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-06-05 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible and reliable introduction to the life and works of Charles Dickens, offering a unique combination of academic biography and literary analysis The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens explores the relationship between Dickens’ lived experience and his works, discussing themes within and key influences on literary classics such as Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, and Great Expectations. An excellent introduction to the world of Dickens scholarship, this easily accessible volume provides the necessary background about the author’s life while encouraging readers to critically analyze Dickens’ works. Organized thematically by chapter, the book opens with a brief overview of Dickens’ life and a chronology of major works. Subsequent chapters focus on key aspects of Dickens’ life, concluding with case studies of selected texts that demonstrate the similarities between events in Dickens’ own life and the literature he was writing at the time. Throughout the book, readers are provided with an informative portrait of Dickens’ early family life, personal relationships, professional networks, social circles, travels abroad, charitable works, financial issues, dealings with publishers, and much more. Incorporates the latest discussions in Dickens research alongside documents and materials from Dickens’ time Discusses the afterlife of Dickens in film, theater, and television, including A Christmas Carol, Dickens’ most adapted story Features archival material from the Charles Dickens Museum and discussion of Dickens’ roles as a journalist, editor, and professional reader Includes short case studies at the end of each chapter to demonstrate the ways Dickens’ life informed his work The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens is an ideal introductory textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in English Literature and Victorian Literature courses, as well as a valuable resource for Dickens scholars and enthusiasts.

Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism

Author : Phyllis Cole
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 9780195152005
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism by : Phyllis Cole

Download or read book Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism written by Phyllis Cole and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Moody Emerson has long been a New England legend, the "eccentric Calvinist aunt" of Ralph Waldo Emerson, wearing a death-shroud as her daily garment. This exciting new study, based on the first reading of all her known letters and diaries, reveals a complex human voice and powerful forerunner of American Transcendentalism. From the years of her famous nephew's infancy, in both private and published writings, she celebrated independence, solitude in nature, and inward communion with God. Mary Moody Emerson inherited both resources and constraints from her family, a lineage of Massachusetts ministers who had earlier practiced spiritual awakening and political resistance against England. Cole discovers a previously unexamined Emerson tradition of fervent piety in the ancestors' own writing and Mary's preservation of their memory. She also examines the position of a woman in this patriarchal family. Barred from the pulpit and university by her sex, she also refused marriage to become a reader, writer, and religious seeker. Cole's biography explores this reading and writing as both a woman's vocation and a gift to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Helping to raise her nephews after their father's death, Mary Moody Emerson urged Waldo the college student to seek solitude in nature and become a divine poet. Cole's pioneering study, tracing crucial lines of influence from Mary Emerson's heretofore unknown texts to her nephew's major works, establishes a fresh and vital source for a central American literary tradition.

Dickens's Forensic Realism

Author : Andrew Mangham
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780814213247
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (132 download)

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Book Synopsis Dickens's Forensic Realism by : Andrew Mangham

Download or read book Dickens's Forensic Realism written by Andrew Mangham and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dickens's Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidence by Andrew Mangham is one of the first studies to bring the medical humanities to bear on the work of Dickens. Turning to the field of forensic medicine (or medical jurisprudence), Mangham uncovers legal and medical contexts for Dickens's ideas that result in new readings of novels, short stories, and journalism by this major Victorian author. Dickens's Forensic Realism argues that the rich and unstable nature of truth and representation in Dickens owes much to the ideas and strategies of a forensic Victorian age, obsessed with questioning the relationship between clues and truths, evidences and answers. As Mangham shows, forensic medicine grew out of a perceived need to understand things with accuracy, leaning in part on the range of objectivities that inspired the inorganic sciences. At the same time, it had the burden of assisting the law in convicting the guilty and in exonerating the innocent. Practitioners of forensic medicine were uniquely mindful of unwanted variables such as human error and the vagaries of interpretation. In readings of Oliver Twist, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations, and Dickens's early journalism, Mangham demonstrates that these questions about signification, perception, and reality are central to the stylistic complexities and playful tone often associated with Dickens. Moreover, the medico-legal context of Dickens's fiction illuminates the richness and profundity, style and impact of Dicken's narratives.