Reading Our Mutual Friend through Victorian News Culture
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Wen, Hsin-Ping
Abstract
This thesis aims to explore the possibilities of links created by Victorian newspaper culture in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. Originally motivated by the segmented and dispersed plotlines in this serialized multiple plot novel, this research paper sought to find out how connections maybe formed in a literary reading culture that was mainly dominated by newspaper reading. These connections are not contradictory to those otherwise formed, for example those formed by serial techniques, nor do they exclude the others, they are an additional possibility. The form of the serial novel breaks the plotlines down, and some of the breaks are especially pronounced in OMF. The first part of this research project will begin with an overview of the historical background for the serial publication of OMF to show the complexity of the links among plotlines and offer newspaper culture as a possible additional interpretation. The second part will focus on the similarities of form and style OMF shares with newspapers. The similarities were able to support the readers in conceiving some parts of OMF connected even though its plotlines do not have a unified focus or an inclusive design. The third part will continue the previous chapter and explore the transmission of information that centers the newspaper in the novel. I argue that the reading, reception, and response to newspaper form a web of information that form some of the links in OMF. My study seeks to demonstrate that as a serial novel situated in a reading culture that was largely dominated by newspaper, OMF is an interaction between serialization and newspaper culture that provides a ground for Dickens to explore an additional way of binding the novel and its plotlines together.
Subjects
Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend
serialization
newspaper culture
transmission of information
Type
thesis
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