Study On Historical Narrative Of Charles Dickens’ Historical Novels

As a critical realistic novelist, Dickens had super literary skills. His workspresented us the broad social and historical scenes of England in19thCentury. Thelashing of realism and the virtue of readability captured the hearts of numerousreaders in the era. This paper, taking Dickens’ two historical novels as example, aimsto explain how literary creations present history in literary ways and thecharacteristics of historical narrative.Dickens was keenly aware of and perceived the realistic world with his uniquehistorical conception. His mainly purpose of creation was to convey the voices ofroughscuff and exposed the unreasonable social phenomena. Without the exception ofhis two historical novels, Dickens exposed reality by depicting history. Through theliterary rethink of group memory and the alternative expression in the fate of family,Dickens reflected the social realities and uneasiness among people’s inner world toupmost, then created two kinds of characters with different life choices, in order toseek a pathway to soul redemption. But Dickens’ historical novels were different fromthe history in general disciplinary sense. The narrative of his novels had its owncharacteristics. As a great language master, Dickens was adept in applying variousnarrative methods to be aware of the subtle in history. Using suspense and expressingthe psychological activities with direct quotation were Dickens’ unique features ofliterature. On the other hand, his historical narrative was a kind of artistic processingon the basis of historical facts, on the opposite of traditional attitudes of writing thegrand historical narrative. Dickens’ historical novels revealed the great history withthe tangible life of ordinary people that possibly appeared in the tide of history. Onceagain, Dickens didn’t give a list of historical facts like documents, but the historicaldetails according to the readers’ esthetic taste. The integration of history withliterature was concretely embodied in Dickens’ historical novels.This paper aims to explore the differences of historical narrative betweenDickens’ historical novels and traditional disciplinary history with the method ofclose reading, manifesting the specialty that literature is literature only. This job willhelp not only to probe the value of Dickens’ historical novels from a new viewpoint,but also to foster the research in Dickens and give enlightenment to theinterdisciplinary research of comparative literature.