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A Study On The Critical Realism And Romanticism In Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities

Posted on:2013-02-08Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:L L YuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2235330395486996Subject:English Language and Literature
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Charles Dickens, the greatest British realist writer of the19thcentury, creates a newera of realism with the fourteen masterpieces which strongly reveal and attack the19thcentury British society. Therefore, he has been respected as the most outstandingcritical realistic novelist, the craftsman of humor and irony and the master oflanguage.“the beacon summon people to laugh and kindness”[1](George Gissing,1974)Dickens’ novels are often dubbed the mark of “realism”. His novels deeply reveal thenational serious social problems of millions of poverty mostly through good peopleor a victim, and all kinds of social evils that are related to the decaying conferencesystem, court, and dark prison—the symbol of bourgeoisie. Dickens’ works areinevitably limited by the social environment and their thoughts, but his creativeimagination is extremely rich and full of passion, except for the sharp depicting ofthe reality. He also draws the thought from the romantic writer such as Rousseau andWordsworth, whose romantic features are absorbed in his works. A Tale of Two Cities(1859) is one of the masterpieces in the later period of Dickens, a historical novelbased on the French Revolution. As the shortest novel of his monumental works, its plot is really the most flexuous, refined and thrilling.This paper mainly deals with Dickens’ criticism of the reality and romanticism withA Tale of Two Cities, forming the sharp-cut contrast with Dickens’ romantic spirit. Byanalyzing the characteristics and the manifestation of critical realism andromanticism, the paper elaborates the development of the plot is the critical realisticprocess, the style of writing is specially sharp, it is full of the sprit of critical realism,but the good characters, the ending of the novel obviously go with some romanticcolor. Finally, the paper concludes that the combination of critical realism andromanticism is peculiar to Dickens, the study of which helps to improve people’sunderstanding of Dickens’ works.
Keywords/Search Tags:a tale of two cities, critical realism, romanticism
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