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Interesting reading of Dickens's fiction as stemming from Dickens's hostile attitude to theatre and theatricality Exploration of the potential of Dickens's novels as adaptations for theatrical performance Exciting and original yoking of textual and performative studies. Log in to review. How do you rate this item? Reviews must contain at least 12 words about the product. This title is available for institutional purchase via Cambridge Core Cambridge Core offers access to academic eBooks from our world-renowned publishing programme. Shakespeare and Victorian Women.
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bahana-line.com: After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture) (): John. £ Part of Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture After Dickens is both a performative reading of Dickens the novelist and an.
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This cannot be undone. Glavin comes up with yet another thought-provoking remark when he propounds that Dickens would have a tendency to use a form of writing that refuses to refer:. This inimitably rich play of Dickensian signifiers is always in riot against the constraining claims of the signified, the signs in gleeful revolt against the demands of written representation. And when Pancks is repeatedly described as snorting and sniffing: Because he severs off any tight, constraining links between signified and signifier to give free rein to verbal pyrotechnics, Dickens turns writing into linguistic performance and calls up the illusion of being constantly extemporizing.
And this is where Kathy Acker, the punk artist, comes in again. Besides, the practice of recycling, and to a certain extent, the collapse of the boundary line between high and low cultures are also common points between the artists. And Dickens himself could also occasionally go over the top. Moreover, both Dickens and Acker are involved in what Clayton calls undisciplined culture, that is a propensity to dabble in many different fields by spanning disciplinary boundaries. The question is not to assimilate Dickens with Acker, which would be totally beside the point, but merely to suggest that theatricality and performance could be one way of exploring a possible bond between the two artists.
The Beginning of Romance and 3. It is more a surge , or an up surge , than a re surge nce, as it spurns, on the face of it at least, any form of in-depth work of the hypotext, choosing instead disjointed jump cut sequences with jarring fragments. The theatrical bond must therefore be approached from the standpoint of performing act, pragmatics or reader response. The general confusion between the theatrical or fictive on the one hand, and the real on the other, is usually underscored. Peter Ackroyd in his biography points to the influence exerted on Dickens by Charles Mathews the monopolylinguist, who had the knack of impersonating different voices in one single performance:.
Dickens is able to bring the light and exaggeration and animation of the theatre to the streets of London [ Bakhtin has studied the subtle interlacing of voices in a few excerpts from Little Dorrit , by underscoring the conflict between two types of utterances, or speech manners, contained within a single, syntactically unified sentence. Such hybrid constructions make up a polyglossic flux which may be perceived through its theatricality. Having thus raised the curtain on the Victorian stage by paying a sort of homage to the vaudeville, the young novelist, with Fingersmith , 18 her third novel, was to immerse herself into the London of Oliver Twist in a thespian way, both vocally and sartorially.
Meta-theatrical allusions are interspersed throughout the fiction: Maud should have been Sue, and Sue Maud, in a novel dealing more especially with the criminal activity of counterfeiting, forging:. One baby becomes another. Your mother was not your mother, your uncle was not your uncle. My life was not lived, I say in a whisper. You have told me, it was a fiction. In this context, the many allusions to cutting keys, and finding the exact likeness of the original sesame may be construed as comments on the relationship between hypertext and hypotext.
Fingersmith smuggles its way into Oliver Twist and also reverses and doubles its perspective by substituting two orphan girls caught up in a twin plot, for one orphan boy. The play was Oliver Twist. I remember it as very terrible. I remember the tilt of the gallery, and the drop of the pit. So the contemporary novelist uses the trope of the theatre as an intertextual bond. However, Orwell asserted that despite his harsh criticism of society, Dickens did not propound any radical change, he merely advocated moral betterment, notably through the ideal of the Moral Gentleman.
For Rushdie, a citizen of the Indian subcontinent, the Victorian novelist could only elicit disappointment and frustration, since the ruthless diagnosis he had made of the ailing centre of the Empire wa s not matched by any sense of rebellion. It entailed nothing more than quietism, procrastination. Back then, for Rushdie the ability to romance the real was no excuse for shunning what he described as the radioactivity of history. Rushdie, who largely contributed to introducing magic realism in fiction written in English, and who is a great admirer of Borges and Garcia Marquez, while being of course well-versed in Indian tales and mythology could not fail to recognize in Dickens the reader of the Arabian Tales.
What Rushdie values above everything else, is this unique and typically Dickensian way of blending naturalism with surrealist effects: This visionary, highly hyperbolic evocation of a totally nonsensical administration is nevertheless depicted by Dickens with many true-to-life, historical details. It is well-known by now that Rushdie is averse to monolithic absolute purity and that, as a result, he flaunts a whole gradient of intermediary colours. He is also, through his name, the embodiment of the archangel Gabriel who belongs jointly to the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions.
In the narrative, he is turned into a devil.
Yet, Rushdie is not so much interested in the opposition between the Archangel and the devil, or their substitutes, or between East and West, as in the possibility of the one turning into the other at any point in time. Significantly, the novel opens when both Chamcha and Farishta jump off a plane that is about to crash. As they fly in mid-air before reaching the ground their two bodies make up one single two-headed form, a sort of odd, fluctuating shape with constantly moving contours.
The embedding technique is mind-boggling. First, it is clearly stated that the original is bound to remain elusive: The characters from the Victorian novel hobnob with the contemporary ones within the narrow precinct of the film-set: The narrator juggles with the onomastic in this film set referred to as Stucconia.