Texts, Contexts and Intertextuality
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Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0 © 2014, V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783847102861 – ISBN E-Lib: 9783737002868 1 Close Reading 2 Schriften zur britischen Literatur- und 3 4 Kulturwissenschaft 5 6 7 8 9 Band 1 10 11 12 13 14 Herausgegeben von Norbert Lennartz 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 Editorial Board: Sabine Coelsch-Foisner (Salzburg), 40 Barbara Schaff (Göttingen), Gerold Sedlmayr (Dortmund) 41 Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0 © 2014, V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783847102861 – ISBN E-Lib: 9783737002868 1 Norbert Lennartz / Dieter Koch (eds.) 2 3 4 5 6 7 Texts, Contexts and Intertextuality 8 9 10 11 Dickens as a Reader 12 13 14 15 With 9 illustrations 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 & 40 V R unipress 41 Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0 © 2014, V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783847102861 – ISBN E-Lib: 9783737002868 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek 22 Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über 23 http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. 24 25 Gedruckt mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Fritz Thyssen-Stiftung. 26 An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working 27 with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books 28 Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN of this book is 978-3-7370-0286-8. 29 More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. 30 31 © 2014, V&R unipress in Göttingen / www.vr-unipress.de 32 Dieses Werk ist als Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der Creative-Commons-Lizenz BY-NC-ND International 4.0 („Namensnennung – Nicht kommerziell – Keine Bearbeitungen“) unter dem 33 DOI 10.14220/9783737002868 abzurufen. Um eine Kopie dieser Lizenz zu sehen, besuchen Sie 34 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. 35 Jede Verwertung in anderen als den durch diese Lizenz zugelassenen Fällen bedarf der vorherigen 36 schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. 37 Umschlagabbildung: Dickens on his Way from London to Paris with his Books to Perform his 38 Readings. André Gill, frontispiece to Éclipse. © Dickens Museum, London. 39 ISSN 2198-9028 40 ISBN 978-3-7370-0286-8 41 Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0 © 2014, V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783847102861 – ISBN E-Lib: 9783737002868 Contents 1. Introduction Norbert Lennartz (Vechta) 1.1 Introduction: Dickens as a Voracious Reader . ...... 9 2. Dickens and the Literary Tradition Matthias Bauer (Tübingen) 2.1 Dickens and Sir Philip Sidney : Desire, Ethics, and Poetics ...... 21 Michael Hollington (Canterbury) 2.2 Dickens and the Commedia dell’arte . ...... 39 Wolfgang G. Müller (Jena) 2.3 Mr. Pickwick – a New Quixote? Charles Dickens’s First Novel in the Tradition of Cervantes . ................... 67 Paul Vita (St. Louis/Madrid) 2.4 Conversation and the Comic Novel: Don Quixote and The Pickwick Papers ..................................... 85 Isabel Vila Cabanes (Jena) 2.5 Reading the Grotesque in the Works of Charles Dickens and Jonathan Swift ...................................... 99 Dieter Koch (Vechta) 2.6 Dickens and the Tradition of the British Picaresque: Smollett, Dickens and Chance . ................................115 Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0 © 2014, V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783847102861 – ISBN E-Lib: 9783737002868 6 Contents Georges Letissier (Nantes) 2.7 Reading Postmodernity into Our Mutual Friend: the World as Text and the Desecration and Redemption of Reading . ......129 3. Dickens as a Reader of Contemporary Literature Rolf Lessenich (Bonn) 3.1 Edward Bulwer-Lytton as a Reader of Charles Dickens . ......147 Angelika Zirker (Tübingen) 3.2 ‘To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt’: Charles Dickens and the Ambiguous Ghost Story . ...................163 Barbara Korte (Freiburg) 3.3 A “comrade and friend”: The Cultural Work of Charles Dickens’s Periodicals . ................................181 Saverio Tomaiuolo (Cassino) 3.4 ‘A Pretty Fair Scholar in Dust’: Recycling the Sensation Novel in Our Mutual Friend . ................................199 Paul Morris (Winnipeg) 3.5 Oliver Twist, the Perils of Child Identity and the Emergence of the Victorian Child ................................215 4. Dickens and Non-Fiction Maria Teresa Chialant (Salerno) 4.1 Physiognomy, Phrenology and Mesmerism: Dickens and the (pseudo)Scientific Discourse . ...................235 Nathalie Vanfasse (Aix/Marseille) 4.2 “Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy”: Dickens as Reader of Victorian Economic Theory? . ......249 Francesca Orestano (Milan) 4.3 Against Reading: Dickens and the Visual Arts . ......263 List of Contributors . ...................283 Index . ................................289 Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0 © 2014, V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783847102861 – ISBN E-Lib: 9783737002868 1. Introduction Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0 © 2014, V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783847102861 – ISBN E-Lib: 9783737002868 Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0 © 2014, V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783847102861 – ISBN E-Lib: 9783737002868 Norbert Lennartz (Vechta) 1.1 Introduction: Dickens as a Voracious Reader If there was a top ten list of underrated and unrecognised writers (at least from a German perspective), Charles Dickens would be in the top three along with Anthony Trollope and George Meredith. While Meredith, another writer from Portsmouth, has always been credited with being a high-brow author, writing for the splendid few, Dickens is still afflicted with the blot of being a vulgar novelist, who, like his contemporary Trollope, is supposed to have catered to the taste of the masses and, as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment,’1 gratified the crude demands of the growing Victorian literary market. Mr Polly’s attitude towards Dickens in H.G. Wells’s 1909 novel The History of Mr Polly is symptomatic: giving the reader a long list of his protagonist’s favourite writers, which range from Rabelais, Boccaccio to Shakespeare and Sterne, Wells only laconically states that Mr Polly did not take kindly to Dickens,2 notwithstanding the fact that he lives in a Dickensian universe inhabited by people that might be borrowed from Dickens’s novels. While critics unanimously agree that the Victorians took to reading and that even anti-heroes such as Mr Polly immersed themselves in canonical texts from the Renaissance to the 18th century, the image of Dickens as a purveyor of sensational stories and a non-intellectual still persists. Stalwartly ignoring the fact that Dickens possessed an impressive library, which J.H. Stonehouse listed in The Library of Charles Dickens from Gadshill as early as in 1935, most of the writers with avantgardist and modernist pretensions seemed to be cementing the notion of Dickens as a cultural Kaspar Hauser. In an autobiographical ac- count by his brother Stanislaus, Joyce, one of the paragons of intertextuality, is reported to have flaunted his indifference to Dickens and to have peremptorily stated that he could not stand the literature of either Scott or Dickens. Given the 1 Dickens is satirised as Mr Popular Sentiment in Trollope’s novel The Warden (1855). See The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens. Anniversary Edition, ed. Paul Schlicke, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011, p. 587. 2 Wells, H.G. (1993), The History of Mr Polly, ed. Norman Mackenzie, London: Everyman, p. 102. Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0 © 2014, V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783847102861 – ISBN E-Lib: 9783737002868 10 Norbert Lennartz manifold allusions to and quotations by Dickens in Ulysses (1922), in particular in ‘Oxen in the Sun,’ we must assume that Joyce’s attitude towards Dickens was much more complex and characterised by what Harold Bloom called an anxiety of influence.3 Trying to immunise himself against the negative aspects of in- fluence, to the “influenza in the realm of literature,”4 Joyce seems to be keen on severing the bonds with the Victorian age and its paragons of culture, but cannot help admitting that he is, like all other modernists, “caught up in a dialectical relationship,”5 in a love-hatred relationship with Dickens. The simple fact that, in the year of Joyce’s publication of Ulysses, T.S. Eliot dallied with the idea of giving his poem The Waste Land (1922) a title based on a quotation from a Dickens novel – ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’ from Our Mutual Friend – makes us clearly aware of the fact that – despite their ostentatious disregard for Dickens – the modernists sensed that the argument of Dickens’s shallowness was becoming untenable. What they could no longer deny was that there was a submerged plurality of voices, positions and opinions in Dickens’s novels, a budding cultural multiperspectivism which not only exceeded the narrow boundaries of Victorian aesthetics, but also revealed the vast knowledge that Dickens must have gained from reading heaps of books and articles. When poets such as T.S. Eliot attached annotations to their highly convoluted poems they made it patently clear that they, unlike the Romantics, were readers who absorbed huge quantities of literature and that they, unlike their prede- cessors, defined poetry and fiction as webs of intertextual references, as jigsaw puzzle elements making up the wider context of time-honoured tradition.6 Their literary works were not only slowly absorbed into the canon of world literature, they were also deeply soaked in the tradition and bristled with clear or oblique references to their predecessors.