Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and ForgivenessAttitudes 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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... Thackeray's art criticism , concludes that Thackeray preferred the rendering of " the historical and the accidental , the transitory moment and the surface detail , rather than the supposedly permanent and essential . " 2 Because he is ...
... Thackeray's own strategy being a combi- nation of candor and evasion . He claims to forgo suspense and surprise , but he cannot abandon the technique of revelation . Thackeray frequently draws analo- gies between fictional narratives ...
... Thackeray , ed . Gordon N. Ray , 4 vols . ( Cambridge : Harvard University Press , 1945-46 ) , 1 : 297-98 . 4. Various critics have called attention to the reader's complicity in Thackeray's narrative method . Jack P. Rawlins ' Thackeray's ...
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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