Dickens: Wilkins Micawber and David Copperfield
The Novel of Upbringing in the Creative
Oeuvre of Charles Dickens (based on the analysis of David Copperfield)
1. The development of the novel of upbringing in the English literature.
The emergence of the literary genre of the novel of upbringing (Germ. Bildungsroman) in the English literature was greatly influenced by the translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in 1823 [5, 7]. However, the origins of it may be traced as far back as Enlightment novels of Richardson, Fielding and Smollett, and perhaps even Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Following the ideas of John Locke (1632-1704), the English philosopher to whom we owe the theory of sensible experience, the representatives of the Enlightment period entertained the belief that only an all-rounded education, harmonious with nature, could inscript on that “tabula rasa” of man his future role as a worthy citizen of a society governed by reason. The genre continued its development in the 19th century in the works of Ch. Dickens, W. Thackeray, G. Meredith, Th. Hardy, and S. Butler in the frame of the realistic novel and well into the 20th century where its traces can be found in Realism as well as in Modernism in the works of J. Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and J. Galsworthy, A. Bennett. Among the main reasons for the flourishment of the novel of upbringing in the English literature X puts the interest to the ways in which man’s character is formed under the influence of the society. The researcher lists the following genre-constituting features of the novel of upbringing: • Biographical time prevails over historical time, which is the result of a more general tendency of the lyric mode prevailing over the epic one; • Textual time and place are governed by the idea of learning by experience, which can only be exercised in a certain spatio-temporal continuity. This results in the marked periods or cycles in the description of the character’s coming-of-age, until his
Oeuvre of Charles Dickens (based on the analysis of David Copperfield)
1. The development of the novel of upbringing in the English literature.
The emergence of the literary genre of the novel of upbringing (Germ. Bildungsroman) in the English literature was greatly influenced by the translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in 1823 [5, 7]. However, the origins of it may be traced as far back as Enlightment novels of Richardson, Fielding and Smollett, and perhaps even Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Following the ideas of John Locke (1632-1704), the English philosopher to whom we owe the theory of sensible experience, the representatives of the Enlightment period entertained the belief that only an all-rounded education, harmonious with nature, could inscript on that “tabula rasa” of man his future role as a worthy citizen of a society governed by reason. The genre continued its development in the 19th century in the works of Ch. Dickens, W. Thackeray, G. Meredith, Th. Hardy, and S. Butler in the frame of the realistic novel and well into the 20th century where its traces can be found in Realism as well as in Modernism in the works of J. Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and J. Galsworthy, A. Bennett. Among the main reasons for the flourishment of the novel of upbringing in the English literature X puts the interest to the ways in which man’s character is formed under the influence of the society. The researcher lists the following genre-constituting features of the novel of upbringing: • Biographical time prevails over historical time, which is the result of a more general tendency of the lyric mode prevailing over the epic one; • Textual time and place are governed by the idea of learning by experience, which can only be exercised in a certain spatio-temporal continuity. This results in the marked periods or cycles in the description of the character’s coming-of-age, until his