Revelry and Realism in Shakespeare and Dickens’ World

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_185How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Revelry; Victorian society; Hierarchy; Great Expectations; A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Abstract

As the greatest literary master in the history of British literature, Shakespeare living in the 16th century exerted great influence on Dickens living in the 19th century. Owing to the proficient command of literacy and language, Dickens’ works broke the existing rules in literature language and manners fettered by the hierarchical order and social regime. Characters in the works were totally lost themselves in the world of revelry to show their sentiments and expectations towards the new era even beyond a far-reaching status for the wholly-revolutionized social system. The indebtedness to Shakespeare in Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities, is all full of intense feelings of noise and excitement under the extreme social background exemplified by Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This thesis mainly adopts the theory of carnivalization seen as a basic principle of Dostoevsky’s art that everything exists on a contrary border including love and malice, self-esteem and self-destruction, faith and atheism, loftiness and degradation, purity and evil. Dickens’ ideal visions for Victorian society under the influence of Shakespeare would be further discussed to uncover mutual morals and ethics on the foundation of political and social meaning through realistic carnival pictures.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Dandan Fan
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/02/13
TI  - Revelry and Realism in Shakespeare and Dickens’ World
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 4th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1444
EP  - 1450
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_185
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_185
ID  - Fan2023
ER  -