Charles Dickens’s Realism and the Romantic Essayists

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Natarajan, Uttara. 2020. Charles Dickens’s Realism and the Romantic Essayists. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 60(4), pp. 761-781. ISSN 0039-3657 [Article]

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Official URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/799655

Abstract or Description

Through a series of textual comparisons between Leigh Hunt’s essays and Charles Dickens’s early city sketches, this article uncovers a neglected genealogy for Dickens’s realistic depictions of the ordinary subject. From establishing Dickens’s debt to the Romantic essayists more generally, I go on to elicit a key distinction. In the essayists’ representations, detail conduces to the construction of a self; in Dickens’s, it signals a close attention to the other. Detail, then, is the marker of the ethical relation modeled in Dickens’s style of ordinariness. Foregrounding this style, I reassert Dickens’s contribution to the developing realism of the mid-nineteenth century.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.1353/sel.2020.0031

Additional Information:

Charles Dickens, Leigh Hunt, realism, Victorian literature