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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Samuel Butler's Life And Habit And The Way Of All Flesh: Traumatic Evolution, Danielle Nielsen
Samuel Butler's Life And Habit And The Way Of All Flesh: Traumatic Evolution, Danielle Nielsen
Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity
Samuel Butler’s seminal evolutionary text Life and Habit (1878) and semiautobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (1903) instill in modern readers a sense of the social discord of the late-Victorian period. The more well-known novel advocates a break with Victorian morality as professed through the Anglican Church and explores the inability to exercise the free will Butler believed people experienced because of the repressive religious culture and, more interestingly, genetically inherited habits and dispositions. The novel also illustrates Butler’s belief in the need to break away from one’s past and family to obtain personal happiness. A joint reading of …
Dickens And Shakespeare’S Household Words, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
Dickens And Shakespeare’S Household Words, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner
Faculty Publications
Though Dickens' Shakespearean qualities have often been noted, less attention has been paid to the way that Dickens constructed the terms of his comparison to Shakespeare, scripting the response he received from critics from the nineteenth century to the present and shaping Shakespeare's reception as well. Focusing on The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield in the context of their Victorian reception, this essay shows how Dickens used Shakespearean quotation to market his characters' quotability, turning them into household words and popularizing Shakespeare's sayings in turn, even as he challenged the universality of quotable phrases.