Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth - Hardcover

Raina, Badri

9780299106102: Dickens and the Dialectic of Growth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299106101 ISBN 13: 9780299106102

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986

In his works, from Oliver Twist to Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens reveals a continuum of artistic as well as social development over a period of four decades. In this highly original study, Badri Raina relates Dickens' novels thoroughly to one another, illuminating the works by seeing them in terms of the author's changing social outlook, personal attitudes, and aesthetic practice. Raina's book will fascinate readers of Dickens, and will serve social historians as well.

The unifying point of Raina's study is Dickens' ambivalence toward respectable Victorian bourgeois society; he criticized the bourgeois myths of unbridled success and achievement through aggressive individualism, yet wished to be a great success himself. Raina argues that Dickens projected this personal ambivalence through the creation of key characters and combinations of characters in his novels, creating also a continual movement toward self-awareness and self-criticism. This personal movement, argues Raina, found expression in a steady improvement in the quality of Dickens' art. Two of the most interesting issues in Dickens studies—that of his development as a novelist and that of his mass appeal in combination with towering aesthetic achievement—are both addressed thoroughly in this lucid and highly readable book.

By following common threads of plot and character through the novels, Raina demonstrates how Dickens matured both socially and artistically, until in his last finished novel, Our Mutual Friend, social values that were earlier espoused (for instance, in Oliver Twist) were wholly and willingly rejected. Raina's critical procedure illuminates not just the career of a Victorian novelist, but one who embraces, traverses, and evaluates the social climate of a critical period of the nineteenth century.

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About the Author:

Badri Raina is Senior Lecturer at Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi. He is the editor or author of several other books, the most recent of which is Raina's Ghalib, a selection of verse translations of the major nineteenth-century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. He has also contributed articles to scholarly journals both in the United States and in India. He received both his M.A. and Ph.D degrees at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Review:

"I have read most of the books of the last twenty-five years that set out to give a complete, developmental account of Dickens' writing. This book is more lucid, the argument is both more complete and more centrally focused than any of the others, and it better integrates Dickens' social outlook, personal attitudes, and aesthetic practice than any other."—Julian Moynahan, Ruthers University

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