A4纸作业

The Reception of Charles Dickens Author: 孙悟空 （Sun Wukong) Class: 666（1） Student Number: 20 Tutor: 唐三藏 College of Foreign Studies, Chang’An University 670.1 Abstract: In the perspective of Reception Theory, the fall and rise of a writer and his works reflect the transition of the reader’s taste. This paper is intended to explore the three periods during which Charles Dickens’ literary works had enjoyed different degrees of popularity. There is a detailed discussion of his Great Expectations as an illustration to this theory. Key words: reception theory, Charles Dickens, horizon of expectations Contents 11. Introduction 12. The Reception Theory 23. The popularity of the critical realistic novels in Dickens’s time 34. Three Periods of Dickens’s Reception 55. The Reception of Great Expectations 55.1 The story of Great Expectations 65.2 Three periods of reception of Great Expectations 75.2.1 The first period (in Dickens’ lifetime) 75.2.2 The second period (from Dickens’ death to the 1930s) 85.2.3 The third period (from the 1930s to the present) 95.2.4 Character portrayal in Great Expectations 106. Conclusion 12Bibliography 1. Introduction A writer will experience reception or objection in different periods of time. Charles Dickens as the greatest of the critical realists also has his fall and rise in terms of readers’ reception and critics’ judgement. His works enjoyed great popularity during his time. But he suffered a major decline in the 1930s. For example George Saintsbury in his A History of Nineteenth-Century Literature gives Walter Scott more space than Dickens. In The Great Tradition F.R. Leavis opens with the characteristically combative statement that "the great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad" whereas Dickens, as being a "great entertainer", lacks "sustained seriousness". However, recently, Dickens has been reclaimed from the realm of mere entertainer and praised as an incisive social critic of profound symbolic significance. In the eyes of the receptionists the fall and rise of a writer and his works reflect the transition of reader’s taste and behavior in different period. Jauss, one of the most important German exponent of the Reception Theory, thinks this phenomenon the transition of the “horizon of expectation” of the readers, which is influenced by pre-understanding and knowledge of different readers, and the content that the writer have showed. (Cf. Selden, 1985: 114) This paper is intended to explore the reception of Charles Dickens in the perspective of the Reception Theory. It tries to give a feasible account of factors that underlie such phenomenon by a detailed discussion on the reception of his Great Expectations. 2. The Reception Theory The Reception Theory is concerned with the relationship between text and reader and reader and text, and examines the reader's role in literature with the emphasis on the different ways in which a reader participates in the course of reading. It is concerned with the reader's contribution to a text. Jauss has given the term “horizon of expectation” to describe the criteria readers use to judge literature texts in any given period. Different reader will use different criteria, thus the meaning of a text will vary. The text meaning is open to all readers in any period: “A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue.” (cf. Selden, 1986:114-115) The Reception Theory foregrounds the reader's contribution to a text. According to it the reader is an active agent in the creation of meaning. A text, whatever it be (poem, essay, or fiction), has no real existence until it is read. During the process of reading, the reader will bring to the work certain “pre-understanding”, a dim context of beliefs and expectations within which the work’s various features will be assessed. This kind of “pre-understanding” is the horizon of expectation of reader. Horizon of expectations is to a large extent related to a set of social, historical and cultural norms, which reflects the aesthetic criteria in a certain period. 3. The popularity of the critical realistic novels in Dickens’s time It is a commonplace of modern criticism that the nineteenth century – or perhaps more specifically the Victorian Age – was dominated by the novel. “Fiction” is the word, which sits naturally, in literary terms, with “Victorian”, in the same way that poetry does with “Romantic” or drama with “Restoration”. Fiction in the nineteenth century could and did address every topic, enter every dispute, reflect every ideal of an age perceived by those who lived through it be one of unprecedentedly rapid change. Anthony Trollope in 1870 wrote, “Novels are in the hands of us all; form the Prime Minister down to the last appointed scullery-maid.”And of the novels they could have chosen from (an estimated 40,000 titles published in the course of the nineteenth century), and extraordinary large number have remained in the common currency of popular rather than scholarly reading habits. (Davies, 1989: 93) In the nineteenth century drama or poetry, such as the drama of Shakespeare and the poem of Wordsworth, although they are major influences on most nineteenth-century writers, are not read by the general public to the same extent or for the same reasons as Victorian novelists of considerably lesser claims. There is of course a sense in which the novel is more approachable than drama or poetry. The novel addresses itself directly to “life”, without the intervening artistic medium of verse or dramatic form, which other literary genres do not. It tells stories, reworks the mundane material of everyday life into something significant and it teaches moral lessons. It could be argued that the nineteenth-century novel is the first art form to deal explicitly and realistically with issues, which speak directly to some of the central concerns of twentieth-century consciousness. The novel of this period sprang from a society undergoing a more massive upheaval under the influence of industrialization than in any previous era. Not only was the population shifting irrevocably from an agricultural to an urban base, with all the profound changes in social, working ad family patterns; there were also the dramatic visible changes resulting from technological invention, which altered people’s perceptions and their world. Thomas Carlyle’s famous definition of this period as “the Mechanical Age” focused the anxieties of many contemporaries about the relationship of the individual to society, Carlyle wrote “men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.” The development and preservation of individuality within a society dominated by various kinds of mechanistic systems (moral, social, political, economic, even historical) formed a major theme of fiction throughout the century, these fictions reflected the changes around people, they are more popular and welcomed by the readers. Other reason for this reception is the alternatives to the publication of novels. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the majority of novels were published in three or sometimes four volumes and the “three decker ” retained its popularity until almost the end of the Victorian period. The standard cost of each volume of the novel was half a guinea, a stiff enough price for most middle-class readers and beyond the means of the working class. However, for a subscription of one guinea a year, Readers could borrow a volume at a time from one of the circulating libraries. But novelists would afford the risk of offending the circulating libraries and the creative freedoms of most writers were constrained. The alternatives to publication from the three-volume from to the monthly serialization were initiated by Dickens’ Pickwick Paper in 1836. Novels published in this manner did allow a writer to adjust his or her work in response to reader’s preference. (Davies, 1989: 97) The novel offered a bridge between the reader and the society at large; the social development aroused an eagerness for novel in the reader; and changes in the manner of novel publication made it more favorable for readers to buy novels. All these factors contribute to the popularity of the genre called “fiction”. 4. Three Periods of Dickens’s Reception Dickens is regarded as the greatest representative of English critical realism (Liu, 1993: 333). His works enjoyed a large crowd of readers at his time. However, in the perspective of the Reception Theory, his novels cannot remain “monuments”, i.e., they will be open to all readers in any period of time. The criticism about Charles Dickens mainly can be divided into two kinds: one group gives high praise to his early novels; the other group tends to base its praise to his later novels. But on the whole the reception of Charles Dickens had undergone three periods. The first one is in the author’s lifetime. In this period, without doubt, Dickens was the most popular writer living then. His novels were read and enjoyed by the readers from the Prime Minister down to the last appointed scullery-maid. We can know these from the following facts: Picwick Paper, establishing Dickens’ reputation as one of the popular writers of the time, was first published, the sales of it was only 400; but to the fifteenth number the sales reached 40,000, and which was copied by other writers. While the sales of The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) reached 100,000. These books reached a very general acceptance by the upper as well as the lower class of the reading public. Of course the cheap serial form of publication which he continued to the end of his life made it possible for even those with a very limited income to purchase each number as it appeared, and in many instances the proprietor of a rooming house, members of various workers’ clubs, mutual benefit organizations and other working-class groups would subscribe and read them aloud weekly, biweekly or monthly. It is true that Dickens had an enormous reading public including an extraordinary number of lower middle-class and working class readers more than any other English writer has ever yet had. However, after his death to 1930s, Dickens suffered a major setback in popularity. With the growing schools such as “Art for Art’s Sake”, Dickens had been condemned as a vulgar writer, as some critics remarked at that time, ...in the same way that Shakespeare, Cervants and Gogol were vulgar, because he and they represent that actual life of which the refined and elegant constitutes but an insignificant and imperceptible. He is vulgar in so far as he is expansive, unrestrained in mirth and tears, in so far as there is nothing in him insincere. (Cf. Rubinstein, 1988: 751) The dominant literary critic F.R. Leavis even denounces Dickens as merely being a “great entertainer” who “lacks sustained seriousness”. But Dickens, like Shakespeare, seems to be sufficiently multi-faceted to have something significant to offer to each successive generation of critics. After the Second World War, Dickens seems to enjoy a renaissance. Just as his contemporaries looked for comedy, and apparently found it, nowadays we discover disturbing psychological concerns in his works. Whereas those who loved Dickens tried rather feebly to defend Dickens’s caricature-style of the characterization as realist, most of us now calmly accept it as part of his complex, symbolically pointed style. While Dickens’s later years of doubts and anxieties worried his contemporaries, they seem to please us as a rich treasure. This fact is well illustrated by such titles The Melancholy Man: a study of Dickens's novels (by John Lucas, 1970; 1980) and The Violent Effigy: a study of Dickens' imagination (by John Carey, 1973). (Cf. Dutton, 1984: 100) It is also well testify by the change in Leavis. He dismissed Dickens in his earlier critical work The Great Tradition, but decades later felt obliged to recant and with his wife Q. D. Leavis produced a full-scale study of the great writer entitled Dickens the Novelist (1970). The prominent literary critic Angus Wilson gave a pronounced worship for Dickens, Dickens first exerted a strong hold over me when I was a somewhat sophisticated boy of eleven. I had already laughed at but failed to understand Pickwick Papers.... Dickens already had the power of “taking me back” in emotion… In the combination of fading childhood fears and impinging adolescent knowledge it was the right passage at the right age. But the intense haunting of my imagination by scenes and characters from Dickens's novels has continued and developed into my middle age. (1984: 55-56) Today Dickens is still enjoyed by public, his novels such as David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Our Mutual Friend and Great Expectations are made into a serial of films or TV plays. There are a lot of facts showing that Dickens still is popular in the world. Soon after the First World War a “Dickens Impersonator” was a common feature of English music halls, and shouted demands for “Mrs.Gamp”, “Dick Swiveller”, “Sam Weller” and others showed the crowd’s familiarity with his repertoire. In 1936, the centennial of his Pickwick Papers, L’Humanite, the great French communist daily, serialized his David Copperfield and in the same year Bastille Day was celebrated in Paris by reprinting extracts from the The Tale Of Two Cities. Two years later an English survey showed Dickens’ work in greater demand than that of any other writer among the prisoners in English jails! (Cf. Rubinstein, 1988:750) But why Dickens should underwent such different reception? In fact the answer to this question has been implied in section 2 and 3. Now Let us take a look at the reception of his Great Expectations as a further and more detailed illustration. 5. The Reception of Great Expectations 5.1 The story of Great Expectations Great Expectations is not indeed Dickens's best work, but it is to be ranked among his happiest. In this story hero is an orphan, Pip, who has two great expectations: one is that he is infatuated with a beautiful but cold-hearted girl, Estella, whom Miss Havisham has reared as her revenge upon the male sex, and marries her. The other is that he wishes to be educated as a gentleman, not an apprentice to his friend and foster – father, Joe Gargery the blacksmith. Through a mysterious benefactor Pip goes to London for his education, and snobbishly neglects his childhood friends. When he is twenty-three, his true benefactor appears, he finds that his fortune is given by the convict, Magwitch, whom he befriended on the marshes, while Estella who he loved is that convict's daughter. Thus hero's expectations depend on this convict, Magwitch, but unfortunately Magwitch is finally retaken, and dies under sentence of death, all of Pip's expectations cannot be realized, but he has learned his lesson in the process of saving Magwitah from the punishment, and is a changed man. From this story we can know that Dickens's original conception was “tragi-comic”, although the ending was changed by persuasion of his friend to be a happy ending, but as Linday says: ...This deformation of the end cannot affect the creative impact of the novel as a whole.... Here lies Dickens’ greatness, in his capacity to grasp and understand this fact in all its fullness. Only Shakespeare before him had been able to live at this intense heart of the struggle of values. (Cf. Rubinstein, 1988: 744-745) In fact Great Expectations is a more successful work of Dickens' later novels. 5.2 Three periods of reception of Great Expectations According to the Reception Theory a literary work is valued and interpreted when it appeared, but does not establish it meaning finally. Jauss thinks it would be equally wrong to say that a work is universal, that its meaning is fixed forever and open to all reader in any period: A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each perios. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue. (Cf. Selden, 1985: 115). Neither meaning nor value is permanently fixed, because the horizon of expectation of each generation will change, and the criteria, which readers use to judge literary texts in any given period, will change. Great Expectations was written in 1861. Like any other Dickens’ novel in reception it had undergone different receptions since it appeared. 5.2.1 The first period (in Dickens’ lifetime) Dickens’ reputation though ultimately based on the sales of his novels, was to a large extent shaped and mold by the literary reviewers of the time. After early triumphant success from Pickwick Papers (1836-7) to David Copperfield (1849-50), Dickens steadily lost his popular appeal as his later novels such as Bleak House, Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities reflected an increasingly sombre mood. In this condition Great Expectations appeared, a number of the early reviewers hailed it as a returned to the old Dickens. The Times, reviewing the bound edition in October, assured its readers that Dickens had descended his gloomy manner of the fifties and had returned to “the old Pickwick style”, and suggested that Great Expectations was merely a jolly book. E.S.Dallas in The Times, 17October 1861 rejoiced that Mr. Dickens has good-naturedly granted to the hosts of his readers the desire of their hearts... Without calling upon his readers for nay alarming sacrifices, Mr. Dickens has in the present work given us more of his earlier fancies than we have had for yeas. There is that flowing humor in Great Expectations which disarms criticism, and which is all the more enjoyable because it defies criticism. (Cf. Dutton, 1984: 95) H.F. Chorley in the Athenaeum, 13 July1861, hailed the novel as “the imaginative book of the year”. And John forstor. (1812-76) remarked that “Dickens’s humor, not less than his creative power, was at its best in [Great Expectations]. (Cf. Dutton, 1984: 95) From these comments we can see that, on the whole, Great Expectations was quite popular in this period. 5.2.2 The second period (from Dickens’ death to the 1930s) However Great Expectations does not figure very prominently in the criticism that appeared in the years after Dickens’s death. The biographer and critic G.H.Leavis (1817-78) does not mention it in his retrospective essay for the Fortnightly Review, “Dickens in Relation to Criticism”(1872); the novelist George Gissing (1857-1903) calls it “that rich little book” but has relatively little to say about it in his Charles Dickens (1898). The essayist, novelist and poet G.K.Chesterton (1874-1936) acknowledge that it was a “fine story, ...told with a consistently and quietude of individuality which is rare in Dickens.” By this he seems to mean that the first-person narrative subdued what he saw as the excesses of Dickens’s contemporaries for the comedy of the earlier novels and regretted “the road of a heavier reality” which Dickens had traveled in Great Expectations and other later works. Actually the literary taste had changed since Dickens death. There appeared several new literary schools in this period of time, such as naturalism, new-romanticism and aestheticism. (Cf. Chen, 1986: 464-474) A major blow to Dickens came from the so-called modernism launched by T. S. Eliot’s publication of Waste Land. Modernism is, in many aspects, a reaction against realism. It rejects rationalism, which is the theoretical base of realism; it excludes from its major concern the external, objective, material world, which is th eonly creative source of realism; by advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation, it casts away almost all the traditional elements i