Dickens and Benjamin
Regular price
€198.40
A01=Gillian Piggott
allegorical criticism
arcades
Arcades Project
Author_Gillian Piggott
Benjamin Claims
Benjamin's Arcades Project
Benjamin's Formulation
Benjamin's Theory
Benjamin’s Arcades Project
Benjamin’s Formulation
Benjamin’s Theory
Berlin Chronicle
Bradley Headstone
Category=DSBF
curiosity
Curiosity Shop
Dead Man
Dickens Quarterly
drama
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
flAcneur urban studies
fragment
german
German Tragic Drama
Gothic City
industrial capitalism studies
Jonas Chuzzlewit
Kunstwerk Im Zeitalter Seiner Technischen
Madame Defarge
memory and modernity
Modern Urban Experience
Mrs Jarley
Mutual Sources
Nell's Passion
Nell’s Passion
Norman St John Stevas
political
project
Redemptive Moments
religious disenchantment
shop
Theodor Wiesengrund
theological
Theological Political Fragment
tragic
Trauerspiel Studies
urban experience theory
urban modernity literary analysis
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781409422013
- Weight: 657g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 13 Dec 2012
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Placing the works of Charles Dickens and Walter Benjamin in conversation with one another, Gillian Piggott argues that the two writers display a shared vision of modernity. Her analysis of their works shows that both writers demonstrate a decreased confidence in the capacity to experience truth or religious meaning in an increasingly materialist world and that both occupy similar positions towards urban modernity and its effect upon experience. Piggott juxtaposes her exploration of Benjamin's ideas on allegory and messianism with an examination of Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, arguing that both writers proffer a melancholy vision of a world devoid of space and time for religious experience, a state of affairs they associate with the onset of industrial capitalism. In Benjamin's The Arcades Project and Dickens's Sketches by Boz and Tale of Two Cities, among other works, the authors converge in their hugely influential treatments of the city as a site of perambulation, creativity, memory, and autobiography. At the same time, both authors relate to the vertiginous, mutable, fast-paced nature of city life as involving a concomitant change in the structure of experience, an alteration that can be understood as a reduction in the capacity to experience fully. Piggott's persuasive analyses enable a reading of Dickens as part of a European, particularly a German, tradition of thinkers and writers of industrialization and modernity. For both Dickens and Benjamin, truth appears only in moments of revelation, in fragments of modernity.
Dr Gillian Piggott is currently visiting lecturer at Middlesex University and Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
