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The essay studies the scene of recognition in four novels by Dickens -- Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and A Tale of Two Cities. It argues that Dickens’s use of the topos of recognition is linked to a specific view of social reality centered on the belief that the legitimacy of the social order and the place of individuals within it are predicated on continuity. The variations that the four novels offer on this topos should be understood as the means by which Dickens attempts to work out a persuasive way of promoting and protecting this view of social reality in spite of the contradictions and impasses it entails.
June 2005: Michal Peled Ginsburg is a Professor of French and Comparative Literatures at Northwestern University (USA). She is the author of Flaubert Writing: A Study in NarrativeStragegies and of Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, both published by Stanford University Press. She is also the co-author, with Moshe Ron, of Shattered Vessels: Memory, Identity, and Creation in the Work of David Shahar (SUNY Press and Ha-Kibbutz Hameuchad)and the editor of Approaches to Teaching Balzac’s Père Goriot (MLA). Her most recent essays are ”The Prose of the World” (in Il Romanzo, ed. Franco Moretti [Einaudi, 2003, IV: 85-110], co-authored with Lorri Nandrea) and ”House and Home in Dombey and Son” (forthcoming, Dickens Studies Annual).
