Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and ForgivenessOhio University Press, 1995 - 504 pages Attitudes toward punishment and forgiveness in English society of the nineteenth century came, for the most part, out of Christianity. In actual experience the ideal was not often met, but in the literature of the time the model was important. For novelists attempting to tell exciting and dramatic stories, violent and criminal activities played an important role, and, according to convention, had to be corrected through poetic justice or human punishment. Both Dickens' and Thackeray's novels subscribed to the ideal, but dealt with the dilemma it presented in slightly different ways. At a time when a great deal of attention has been directed toward economic production and consumption as the bases for value, Reed's well-documented study reviving moral belief as a legitimate concern for the analysis of nineteenth-century English texts is particularly illuminating. |
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... story to his son . So the narrative we have just read becomes , at its conclusion , a story of a time gone by but made ever present by retelling , just as Carton's life , at the moment it ends , becomes an exemplary story worthy of ...
... story and of the narrator's involvement in it . But the narrator simultaneously con- tinues the pretence that the story he narrates is independent of him . Near the end of the novel he describes how Dobbin learns Rebecca's history from ...
... stories . But if the narrator is right in saying that all stories are old stories already known , then the critic's judgment upon him is meaningless , since any story that is told already exists and thus each new narration is , in the ...
Contents
Attitudes Toward Punishment and Forgiveness | 3 |
Some of the contents of this study appeared elsewhere in different form Mate | 28 |
Education | 30 |
Copyright | |
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