Date Published:
2 June, 2011
Abstract:
Carlyle's view of modern life as a palimpsest serves as a postulate for his Victorian contemporaries and successors, who make it into the defining idea of the modern city. Following Carlyle's lead, they explore the urban palimpsest, yet nor for them is his prophetic voice of guilt and punishment. Rather, in exploring the uneasy pleasures in the juxtaposition of the urban layers of modern experience, in The Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend and other novels Dickens strikes the modern note of the attraction of repulsion as well as shifting, alternating, alternative realities. The boundaries of class and species are honeycombed by pathways which hum with traffic and constant crossings of the layers of the palimpsest of modern urban life, and the reader navigates among unstable places together with the narrators who are often split and divided along the fault lines of urban life.
Murray Baumgarten is Research Professor of Literature and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Founding Director of the Dickens Project of the University of California, and Emeritus Editor of Judaism. He is the author of Carlyle and His Era (1975), Carlyle: Books & Margins (1980), City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (1982), and numerous articles on nineteenth-century English literature as well as on American-Jewish writers. With Barbara Gottfried he has co-authored Understanding Philip Roth (1990). He has served as Editor in Chief of the California Strouse Carlyle Edition and has co-edited Homes and Homelessness in the Victorian Imagination (1999, with H. M. Daleski) and Jewish Culture and the Hispanic World: Essays in Memory of Joseph H. Silverman (2001, with Samuel G. Armistead, Mishael M. Caspi, and Juan de la Cuesta). He is a Founding Board Member of the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies. Updated: March 20, 2016 |
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