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Dickens and the Pleasure of the Text: The Risks of Hard Times

Date Published:

8 June, 2011

Abstract:

This essay examines the pleasure of the text in Dickens's novel Hard Times (1854) and considers the risks it takes in its performance as a novel in a utilitarian economy. Walking a tightrope between employing the genre as an agent of social change and entertaining middle-class readers, Dickens fuses homo ludens with homo faber. The sheer pleasure of reading must be shown to be useful, yet the novel has not proven popular until recent years and its moral message does not wear will in a postmodern hedonistic culture. Nevertheless, imagination as means as well as metaphor must be tested by its success, and the author, like Mr Jupe, cannot afford to miss a trick.

 

June 2011: Efraim Sicher teaches English and comparative literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva. His fields of research are dystopian fiction, the nineteenth-century novel, and modern Jewish culture. He is the author of Jews in Russian Literature (1995; reissued 2005), Rereading the City / Rereading Dickens (2003; revised edition 2012), The Holocaust Novel (2005), Babel in Context (2012) and (with Linda Weinhouse) Under Postcolonial Eyes (2012). He is also the editor of Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz (1998) and Race, Color, Identity (2013), and has edited the works of Isaak Babel in Russian, English, and Hebrew.

 

updated October 14, 2013

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 9, Issue 2 Narrative as a Way of Thinking
Last updated on 04/16/2020