Naslov
Poverty and the Circulation of Capital in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations

Autori
Knežević, Borislav

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, znanstveni

Skup
14th ESSE Conference

Mjesto i datum
Brno, Češka Republika, 29.08.2018. - 02.09.2018

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
Charles Dickens, poverty, capital

Sažetak
Great Expectations is a narrative concerned primarily with expectations of social mobility, and in that regard it presents both its own account and its own critique of the contemporary system of social class. In this concern with social mobility, the narrative perhaps seems less directly focused on representations of poverty than on ideological dilemmas attendant on the protagonist’s social aspirations ; this relative indirectness is nevertheless coupled with a particular narrative framing of the representations of poverty and the representations of the circuits of capital. How indeed does the novel imagine the generation of economic wealth and social prestige on the one hand and poverty on the other hand, the issues that inform centrally the creation of the great expectations entertained by its protagonist (as well as by some other characters, in different ways)? The aim of this paper is to examine an ideological tension in the novel’s understanding of economic and social capital (and their absence) ; namely, while the novel seems to endorse the Victorian middle-class tenet of self-reliance (as an ideological position that its narrator/protagonist eventually adopts), it also features various narrative situations of an interplay between capital (economic and social) and the posited but largely under-narrativized notion of the work of self-making.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

POVEZANOST RADA