A Study Of Hard Times From The Perspective Of Eco-criticism

Charles Dickens, one of the greatest novelists of Great Britain in 19 th century,also is a critical realism novelist in the world. Hard Times is a novel created by Dickens during his mature period, the novel is about the"hard life" experienced by all people of an industrial town—Coketown. Usually the studies of Hard Times are in the perspective of the contradiction between the Capitalist Josiah Bounderby and the working class, and also the benthamism of Thomas Gradgrind. While the disclose of the"hard life" in the crisis during the industrialization, urbanization and the contradiction of the social class, the alienation of the human spirit and so on, Dickens actually made the Hard Times with a study in the great perspective of Eco-criticism.The paper uses"trichotomy" criticism theory, which concludes Natural Ecology,Social Ecology and Spiritual Ecology, and intensive reading of the novel itself to study the rich implication in the Eco-thought from the perspectives of the novel’s name, the name of the sections, the setting of the characters and the plot arrangement,language characteristic etc., and combining the natural environment, social and historical conditions in Victorian Period, to explore the"hard life" in Hard Times of all levels of the society at the most powerful and prosperous period in UK. Dickens not only discloses the social and class conflicts between Bounderby and the working class, and the failure of Gradgrind’s benthamism education philosophy in the Hard Times, but also describes the ash black smoke hang over the Coketown, the purple and smelly rivers polluted by factory waste, the repeated working machines as the blue elephant, the repetitive workers, the school only teaching rational knowledge and facts education, the alienation kinship affected by money, the love relationship and other more social reality. Through the study of Natural Ecology, Social Ecology and Spiritual Ecology in the novel to disclose the immediate and root cause of the"hard life", this paper is to study the Eco-crisis Consciousness arose by Dickens in Hard Times in Victorian Period, in order to break through the perspectives limitations of previous studies on Hard Times, and to expand the study of the novel from the perspective of eco-criticism, so as to offer certain thoughts and inspiration to us as we are facing the same critical eco-crisis.