Date Published:
12 June, 2011
Abstract:
In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens uses physiognomy as an indirect way of portraying characters that observe their fellow-characters rather than as a direct means of portraying the characters observed. This reading of faces often constitutes misinterpretation: Dickens links Our Mutual Friend to the issue of reading itself, providing models of reader response. Misreadings thus become morally and aesthetically relevant to the overall structure and effect of the novel.
| June 2011: Dr. Angelika Zirker is a research assistant and lecturer of English philology at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, Germany. Her PhD (published in 2010) is about The Pilgrim as a Child: Concepts of Play, Language and Salvation in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books. She is an associate member of the postgraduate programme Dimensions of Ambiguity, and co-editor of Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate. Her research interests and publications include Shakespeare, Early Modern Poetry, children’s literature and concepts of childhood, literature and ethics, as well as nineteenth-century literature and culture, with a strong emphasis on the novel. Her current project deals with the relations between poetry and the stage during the Early Modern period, with a particular focus on Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, and John Donne. |
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