Year: 1971
Type: article
Abstract: urbanization and the harmonies of natural forces.In short, it is a contrast between the spontaneous and the mechanical -the sea vs.the railroad; Florence Dombey vs. her father; the society puppets vs.Lizzie; Oradgrind vs. Sleary; Lucy vs. the revolutionary madness.The latter are harsh, abrupt, mechanical, spastic and compulsive (repetition plays a large role in their creation), while the former are characterized by soft, undulating, lyrical rhythms suggestive of that which is cyclical, eternal and harmonious.Tn the final analysis, it may be said that given Dickens' talents, interests, literary aspirations, social commitment, and philosophy, his impressionistic style was as organic as his own conception of the nature of things. CHAPTER I IMPRESSIONISTIC TECHNIQUES IN DESCRIPTIVE PROSE: COLOR AND VERISIMILITUDE.Dickens' early descriptive style, while it was not without distinction, too often tended to be generalizing, diffuse, and periphrastic, or, at the other extreme, sentimentally simplistic.An uncritical acceptance of prose conventions, including the eighteenth-century model of schematic prose, and his own penchant for rhetorical inflation often led Dickens to fall in with the easy, but tired patterns of a "period style."Tt is true that in Pickwick and Oliver Twist where the prose is more directly faithful to its eighteenth-century origins rather than to second-hand models, descriptions are characteristically concrete and sensually evocative.When he begins to be insistently "moral" in Nickleby, Old Curiosity Shop, and Rudge, there is an increase in inflation, sentimentality, and triteness.When, however, about the time of Chuzzlewit, his critical sense is more systematically applied to his creative impulse, we find the prose conventions beginning to be transformed into something distinctly original and "poetic."Nature description serves as well as any to illustrate the quality of this development -the shift from what was often 21
Author: Judith Fairbank Slater
Institution: The Ohio State University
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2804361786