Choice in Charles Dickens's Later Novels

The Spectator's Art

Series: 

Author:
Keith Easley
We read the book, and the book is reading us. In his later novels, Charles Dickens uses the interaction between characters and their audiences within the fiction to dramatise his growing understanding of the pivotal role of spectatorship and choice in a more democratic society. Egotists of all stripes, intent on bending the world to their singular will, would appropriate the power of spectatorship by taking command of the detachment necessary for choice. Dickens’s pluralistic art of sameness and difference redefines that detachment, and liberates choice both inside and outside the novels, for the relationship between characters and their audiences within the narratives actually inscribes our own relationship with them in the performance of reading, a reflective doubling of the fiction upon the reader across time with moral consequences for our spectatorship of our own lives.
Copyright Year:
2023
E-Book (PDF)
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-54372-0
Publication:
19 Jun 2023
Hardback
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-52849-9
Publication:
26 Jun 2023
Cover Choice in Charles Dickens's Later Novels

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Keith Easley (PhD 2010, Aichi Shukutoku University) has taught at Nanzan and Aichi Shukutoku Universities in Japan. He is the author of Dickens and Bakhtin: Authoring and Dialogism in Dickens's Novels, 1849-1861 (2013).
Acknowledgements

Introduction
 1 Democracy: Political and Aesthetic

 2 Dickens’s Democratic Aesthetic

 3 Our Mutual Friend: Detachment and Money

 4 A Tale of Two Cities: Reciprocity and Making History

 5 The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Time and the Denial of Love


1 Our Mutual Friend Detachment and Money
 1 Introduction

 2 Controlling Spectatorship

 3 True Detachment

 4 Dickens’s Democratic Aesthetic

 5 The Reciprocity of Wonder

 6 Threefold Wonder and Time: Bella Wilfer

 7 Threefold Wonder and Time: Eugene Wrayburn

 8 Choice: The Reader and the Book


2 A Tale of Two Cities Reciprocity and Making History
 1 Introduction

 2 Silence and Spectatorship

 3 Duplication and Doubling

 4 Mystery of Character

 5 Revolution and the Reader

 6 Temporal Moral Creativity

 7 Melodramatic Fairy Tale

 8 Mystery and Doctor Manette


3 The Mystery of Edwin Drood Time and the Denial of Love
 1 Introduction

 2 Observation

 3 Staging Sight

 4 Singularity and Dualism

 5 Visual Imagination

 6 The Act of Witness

 7 Breaking Singularity

 8 Staging Time

 9 Coda: The Choice of an End


Conclusion

Works Cited

Index

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