Dickens and Bakhtin : authoring and dialogism in Dickens's novels, 1849-1861
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Dickens and Bakhtin : authoring and dialogism in Dickens's novels, 1849-1861
（AMS studies in the nineteenth century, no. 48）
AMS Press, c2013
Available at / 8 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [189]-197) and indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Truth belongs to no one person, says Mikhail Bakhtin, but rather is created and lives or dies among people. The Russian philosopher’s concepts of authoring and dialogism offer important ways of participating in the intersubjective activity we call human understanding, and only through that participation, Bakhtin insists, may we realise the truths that enable us to take responsibility for ourselves.
Easley applies Bakhtin’s thinking to Dickens’s work and in the process rekindles and reaccentuates Victorian concerns with love, morality, and character. Although we see with the “parted eye” of a different time and place, we play our part in shaping Dickens’s characters, while perhaps coming to appreciate that we are also shaped, for good or ill, by them.
Our attempts to aesthetically love our heroes and heroines may afford greater knowledge of self for both characters and the reader, but anyone may fall victim to the lure of Dickens’s and Bakhtin’s common enemy—that figure with whom we share so much and in whose image Western society is formed: the self-made man who would consume the world in his self-consummation. Dickens’s greatest novels are defined by their remarkable success in countering this power.
by "Nielsen BookData"