Item Details

title

The Novel Novel: Dickens' Reformulations of Shakespeare's Hamlet

author

Jones, Elizabeth Anna

abstract

From 1830 to the mid 1870s, interest in Shakespeare flourished in England, and an extensive number of scholars have written about this fact. Many of those writers include Charles Dickens in their arguments. In spite of this plethora of research, I propose a new light through which to analyze Dickens and the Victorian Shakespeare, that of the conflation of the stage and the novel and the way in which they interact, focusing particularly on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and using M.M. Bakhtin’s theory of the novel to analyze this interaction. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin contrasts the young genre of the novel with other genres set in their strict structure. In appropriating the drama of Hamlet into his novels, Dickens takes advantage of the young and fluid nature of the novel in order to more closely examine Hamlet. Overall, I argue in this paper that Dickens’ incorporation of Hamlet into his novels allows one to discover new aspects of Hamlet that one cannot analyze on the stage, and I focus specifically on Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, and A Christmas Carol and divide my thesis into three major sections, the stage, the hero, and King Hamlet’s ghost.

subject

Dickens

Hamlet

Bakhtin

Genre theory

Shakespeare

Drama

Novel

contributor

Valbuena, Olga (committee chair)

Jenkins, Melissa (committee member)

Richard, Jessica (committee member)

date

2010-05-07T18:10:37Z (accessioned)

2010-06-18T18:59:28Z (accessioned)

2010-05-07T18:10:37Z (available)

2010-06-18T18:59:28Z (available)

2010-05-07T18:10:37Z (issued)

degree

English (discipline)

identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/14856 (uri)

publisher

Wake Forest University

rights

Release the entire work immediately for access worldwide. (accessRights)

type

Thesis