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Dark Side of the Moon: Dickens and the Supernatural

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Soumya Chakraborty, Jadavpur University

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Abstract

Quite overshadowed by Dickens the social reformer and Victorian England’s most popular and prolific author, lay Dickens a man fascinated with the occult and the supernatural, a practitioner of mesmerism, a believer in the pseudo-science of phrenology, a man so obsessed with the Gothic that time and again he registered a covert, symbolic re-emergence of it throughout his works. Dickens harboured a lifelong attraction towards the supernatural, evidenced in his childhood fondness for the weekly magazine The Terrific Register, dealing with themes of ghosts, murder, incest and cannibalism, and in the several ghost-stories interspersed throughout the corpus of his work. Deeply involved in the 19th Century debates over the existence of spirits and the veracity of ghost sightings, Dickens oscillated between faith in the existence of the other-worldly and scepticism. Always concerned with the psychological aspect of the supernatural, Dickens’ work shows a constant engagement with the eerie, the uncanny and the grotesque. This paper attempts to explore not only the evolution of the theme of the supernatural in Dickens’ works but also his changing attitudes towards it. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Ontological Concerns in Charles Dickens’s “The Ivy Green” and Odysseus Elytis’ “The Mad Pomegranate Tree”: A Comparison

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Bibhudutt Dash, SCS College, Puri, Orissa

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Abstract

This paper compares the existential problems addressed in Charles Dickens’ poem “The Ivy Green” and the Greek poet Odysseus Elytis’ poem “The Mad Pomegranate Tree.” While it highlights Dickens’ portrayal of the theme of death, contrasted with Elytis’ rapture at the variegated functions and the youthfulness of the tree, it also underlines how the lithesome movement of the Ivy green upon the dead awakens in us an understanding of the inevitable. Keep Reading

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Cultural Outlook of Literary Dialect in Hard Times and Silas Marner

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Serir-Mortad Ilhem, Abu Bekr Belkaid University, Tlemcen, Algeria

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Abstract 

This paper is an attempt to help plug the oral utterance as it occurs in dialogue with the cultural impact in a given society, i.e. to explain the cultural significance of the variants and indicate how the use of dialect by humble characters can interpret a whole system of society mapped by Dickens and Eliot in Hard Times and Silas Marner respectively. Otherwise, the paper is designed to provide the type of speech community in Hard Times and Silas Marner besides the different cultural components of such communities that could the dialectal variables, used by the different characters in the novels, amply reflect through their speech. Hard Times and Silas Marner offer interesting raw material for literary dialect analysis, since each of dialect characters denotes a linguistic strategy to reflect cultural interpretation. Keep Reading

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Hard Times as a Dickensian Dystopia

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P. Prayer Elmo Raj, Karunya University Coimbatore

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Hard Times is a dystopia. Hard Times investigates and launches the deplorable Victorian industrial society through the presentation of its setting and characters. The society which the Hard Times explores is one characterized by poverty, denial and oppression. Freedom and happiness were established by the political and economic elites. Right to think and right to fancy was determined by the dominant. The prevalent Utilitarian educational philosophy created havoc in the lives of pupils who were prepared to work in the factories. This paper is an attempt to map the dystopian account of Victorian industrial society as portrayed by Charles Dickens in the Hard Times. Keep Reading

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The Reconstruction of Identity of the Gentleman in Great Expectations

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Madhumita Majumdar, Bhangar Mahavidyalaya, Kolkata

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      When people say that Dickens could not describe a gentleman, what they mean is …that Dickens could not describe a gentleman as gentlemen feel a gentleman. They mean that he could not take that atmosphere easily, accept it as normal atmosphere, or describes that world from the inside….Dickens did not describe gentleman in the way that gentlemen describe gentlemen…He described them…from the outside, as he described any other oddity or special trade.

G. K. Chesterton only put into words what was usually thought of Dickens during his life time. It was usually believed that Dickens could not describe a gentleman because he was himself not one. In 1871, Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens reported the imprisonment of Dickens’ father on charges of debt non-payment and his own childhood employee status in the blacking factory. This revelation only gave confirmation to Dickens’ detractors that he was not the conventional gentleman. It stood ratified more by the words of Dickens daughter: ‘My father was not a gentleman – he was too mixed to be gentleman.’ (Kate Dickens Perugino, The Dickensian; 1980). When Dickens was writing his contemporary happened to be William Thackeray. Both Dickens and Thackeray were novelists of the middle-class emergence but at opposite ends of the scale. Thackeray’s area was the land between the aristocracy and the middle classes while Dickens was concerned with the lower reaches of the middle class in its most anxious phase of self-definition, struggling out of trade and domestic service. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Dickens the Crime Writer: a Reading of Dickens’ Pioneering Crime Novels

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Shukla Chatterjee,  Dr. B. C. Roy College of Pharmacy and AHS, Durgapur, West Bengal, India

 Sanjukta Banerjee, Durgapur Society of Management Science, Durgapur, West Bengal, India

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 Abstract

The context of crime and detection has always produced sensation amidst readers since the dawn of the genre of detective fiction in the eighteenth century. In line with other specific detective fiction authors, elements of suspense, thriller, mystery and crime are often found in the works of Charles Dickens. Though the presence of such literary forms in Dickens’ writings are primarily a result of Victorian obsession towards crime, jail, prison and policing, Dickens is read more as a social novelist rather than a crime writer. A close analysis of Dickens’ great body of work including both fiction and non-fiction marks the evolution of crime fiction from the initial success of the detective story to the height of Holmes’ popularity in the early twentieth century. In spite of this insight, Dickens’ crime writing is perhaps an undervalued aspect. In this paper, therefore, we propose to read Dickens, as a crime writer with reference to his revolutionary crime novels and try to find a reason for undervaluing his aspect of crime writing which in a way would attempt to prove either his success or weakening of his ability as a crime writer. Keep Reading

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Exploring Dickens through a Director’s Lens: a Study of the Cinematic Presentation of A Tale of Two Cities

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Gatha Sharma, Shiv Nadar University, Gautam Budh Nagar, Uttar Pradesh

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 An interesting thing always noticed by avid movie-buffs is when one watches a movie made on a novel, automatically one starts identifying characters of the novel with the actors who have played those characters. Actors give new identity and life to the characters hitherto without any proper face or shape, enclosed in the black alphabets and yellow pages of the books. This paper is an attempt to see how the complex art of Charles Dickens find expression through cinema. A Tale of Two Cities is one of the two historical novels written by Charles Dickens. Attempting historical fiction is a tough task. Author has to shift back mentally to those ages and keep track of not only historical but also political, social, economic and spiritual environment of those times. Historically, A Tale of Two Cities has tried to capture extremely volatile years of French Revolution. Impacts of French Revolution were far-reaching and had been felt for many decades afterwards by Europe and later became an inspiration to many freedom movements in Asia, Africa and Russia. Praise to Charles Dickens for attempting such a story and also to all those directors who tried to portray such a razzmatazz on the big screen. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

The Christmas Boooks: a non-Dickensian Paradise of Fantasy, Magic and Supernatural

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Namrata Dey Roy, Susil Kar College , South 24-Parganas

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Abstract

‘Fantasy’, ‘magic’, and ‘supernatural’ – all these words reside far away from the world of Charles Dickens’s novels. The realistic representation of the Victorian society and its cruel maladies in novels like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations have enriched the English literature and genre novel to a great extent. But The Christmas Books containing A Christmas Carol (1943), The Chimes (1944) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1945) stands as something different from the worn-out tradition of Dickensian novels. With the free play of fantasy, magic and supernatural these stories not only trade the ground of children’s fiction but also verge on the boundary of magic-realism. The paper explores the dominant features of a children’s fantasy and magic realistic elements that are embedded in these novellas with focusing on the major themes and ideas. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Charles Dickens: a Reformist or a Compromiser

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Abdollah Keshavarzi, Firoozabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran

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Abstract

Charles Dickens’s fame as a reformer of his society has been discussed by a lot of his critics. However, his novels and letters as well as his own words point out that he tries to strengthen the dominant ideologies of his age and to be in the mainstream of the ruling middle class. Through Althusser’s notion of Ideological State Apparatuses, this paper concludes that Dickens can be considered a compromiser and a real Subject of his society who transforms the individuals of his society to docile subjects. As such, he cannot be considered a reformer of his age. Keep Reading

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What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

Unknown Civilization of Prehistoric India by Subhashis Das

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The book Unknown Civilization of Prehistoric India is kind of a sequel to Subhashis Das’ previous book Sacred Stones in India Civilization. It deals with the unknown civilization of India, i.e. of the proto-austroloid Kolarian tribes, and their archaeological relics, the megaliths. The book delves into the realm of the myth that all megaliths are burials and finds out that it isn’t necessarily so. The ancient megalithic tribes apart for funerary reasons built their megaliths for various purposes among which a few were for astronomical observations and calendrical uses. The book reveals the knowledge of astronomy and mathematics prevalent in the prehistoric era of India among a section of its megalithic denizens. The book substantiates this claim by describing the surface architecture of a few astronomical megaliths across the country as that of Chano, Punkri Burwadih and Nilurallu by demonstrating how mathematics and astronomy were used in their construction. The book also deals with the now defunct fertility cult once practiced by these tribes in the yesteryears. It thereafter pursues their folklores in search of their original homeland and finds it to be ancient Sumeria/ Chaldea as believed by the Santali scholars and Gurus. The book discovers parallels between the names of people, towns and rivers of present day austric adivasis and the ones mentioned in the Old Testament and discovers that the Horites of Bible and the tribal Hors of India are of the same lot. The book also finds a lot many austric Mundari words still in use in many European languages. The stunning similarities among the architectures of megaliths of Britain, Europe and India may startle the readers but the book discloses that such a phenomenon could only be the fall out of a contact between the far flung lands during hoary times. The book also has description of a quite many megalithic sites in the country. Until or unless megaliths are accepted as true relics of India’s ancient history, their makers; the tribals and their folk tales accepted as oral history the real ancient history of India can never surface. The book Unknown Civilization of Prehistoric India does just that. The book also includes a single complimentary chapter by the eminent author and ex- archaeologist Terrence Meaden of the Oxford University.

The book is priced at Rs 1500 and it will soon be available in many prominent book stores of the country and on the web.

The book can also be obtained from the publisher:

Kaveri Books

4832/34 Ansari Road, Darya Ganj, New Delhi 110002.

Email: kaveribooks@gmail.com

Phone Numbers: 011 23288140, 23245799.

You might be interested in

What is Performance Studies?

Richard Schechner Tisch School of the Arts, New York University  Download PDF Version Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and

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