Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe: From ‘The Chimes’ to ‘The Bells’
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CONTRIBUTORS:
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CONFERENCE TITLE:
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CONF. LOCATION:
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None
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YEAR:
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2012
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PUB TYPE:
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Conference Paper
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SUBJECT(S):
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Charles Dickens; Edgar Allan Poe
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DISCIPLINE:
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Literature
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HTTP:
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LANGUAGE:
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English
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PUB ID:
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103-503-866
(Last edited on
2012/06/25 02:59:27 GMT-6)
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SPONSOR(S):
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ABSTRACT:
This paper compares ‘The Chimes’ (1844), the second novella in Dickens’ series of Christmas Books and a fierce instance of his social criticism, with another mid-nineteenth-century text that is known to bear its imprint, Edgar Allan Poe’s onomatopoeic poem ‘The Bells’ (published in 1849). As background to the textual comparison, consideration is given to the history of the Dickens-Poe relationship, the two writers’ meeting in Philadelphia in 1842, and the circumstance of both authors also having a public role as performance artists. The two texts are then examined to demonstrate how, while both employ bells or chimes as their central motif and exploit apparently supernatural themes to more sophisticated ends, the American writer’s poem diverges radically from Dickens’ story in replacing the British author’s social and polemical emphasis with an aestheticist concept in which literature tends in an abstract direction approximating it to music. The textual contrast highlights the fecund polyvalence of Dickens’ writing, shown to be capable of influencing a contemporary such as Poe who nonetheless pursued radically different literary paths.
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