“Accidents will happen”: Dickens’s Comical Mishaps

IF 0.7 1区 文学 0 LITERATURE, BRITISH ISLES
T. Wagner
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Abstract:This article critically unpacks the complex narrative potential that mishaps fulfil in Dickens’s fiction. It parses the way comedy works in his depiction of the various accidents of daily life and explores how their shifting narrative functions influentially shaped the representation of personal misfortune and social ethics at a time that saw competing interpretative frameworks of why accidents happen. Situating Dickens’s fictional mishaps amidst the changing concepts of the accidental in the nineteenth century, I trace how he creates comedy based on pantomimic transformations in The Pickwick Papers, and how this mode continues to operate in his writing. Martin Chuzzlewit then marks a turning-point in prefiguring sensational representations of seeming household accidents. In Dickens’s later novels, the comedy of accidents shifts towards a parodic engagement with specific – individual and institutional – interpretations. Thus, in Little Dorrit, accidents and their misinterpretations comically complicate competing ideas of probability, misfortune, and poetic justice.
“意外总会发生”:狄更斯的《滑稽的灾难》
摘要:本文批判性地剖析了不幸在狄更斯小说中所发挥的复杂叙事潜能。它分析了喜剧在他对日常生活中各种事故的描述中的运作方式,并探讨了他们的叙事功能的变化如何影响了个人不幸和社会伦理的表现,在那个时代,人们对事故发生的解释框架是相互竞争的。我将狄更斯的小说灾难置于19世纪意外概念的变化之中,探究他是如何在《匹克威克外传》中以哑剧的转变为基础创作喜剧的,以及这种模式是如何在他的作品中继续发挥作用的。马丁·丘兹莱维特在预言看似家庭事故的耸人听闻的表现方面标志着一个转折点。在狄更斯后期的小说中,意外喜剧转向了对具体的——个人的和制度的——解释的戏仿。因此,在《小杜丽》中,事故和对事故的误解滑稽地复杂化了概率、不幸和诗意正义等相互矛盾的概念。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
DICKENS QUARTERLY
DICKENS QUARTERLY LITERATURE, BRITISH ISLES-
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
16.70%
发文量
33
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