The French Revolution in the Popular Imagination: A Tale of Two Cities
刘颖
摘要：本文作者从荻更斯的《双城记》出发，分析小说的创作背景，及对英国和革命前法国的社会背景进行相同点和不同点的比较。
关键词：革命 想象 比较
Abstract: according to the Charles Dickens'a tale of two cities, the author of
the thesis analyze the setting of this novel and compare the similitude and different
part of England and pre-revolutionary France.
Key words: revolution imagination comparison
I. Introduction
In the eighteen-fifties, Charles Dickens was concerned that social problems in
England, particularly those relating to the condition of the poor, might provoke
a mass reaction on the scale of the French Revolution. In a letter written in
1855, for example, he refers to the unrest of the time as follows:
I believe the discontent to be so much the worse for smouldering, instead of blazing
openly, that it is extremely like the general mind of France before the breaking
out of the first Revolution, and is in danger of being turned … into such a devil
of a conflagration as never has been beheld since. (qtd. in I. Collins 42)
II. Contemporary Reception of A Tale of Two Cities
III. France and England in A Tale of Two Cities
IV. Dickens, The French Revolution, and the legacy of A Tale of Two Cities
V Conclusion
A Tale of Two Cities promoted the image of a stable England by using revolutionary
France as a setting to highlight the contrasts between the two countries, although
Dickens seemed to believe in the eighteen-fifties that England was heading towards
an uprising on the scale of the French Revolution. In the twentieth century, we
see the French Revolution used as a 'lavish' setting in film and TV productions
of A Tale of Two Cities. In the preface to the novel, Dickens says "It has
been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means of
understanding that terrible time" (xiii). It seems that, through the popular
media, our century has fulfilled Dickens's intention, perhaps even more so than
the previous century. What remains to readers and film/TV audiences is to decide
whether this 'popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time'
through A Tale of Two Cities does justice to that momentous historical phenomenon
called the French Revolution.
Noted
Altick, Richard. Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader
of Victorian Literature. New York: Norton, 1973.
Baumgarten, Murray. "Writing the Revolution." Dickens Studies Annual:
Essays on Victorian Fiction 12 (1983): 161-76.
Collins, Irene. "Charles Dickens and the French Revolution." Literature
and History 1.1 (1990): 40-57.
Collins, Philip, ed. Dickens: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1971.
Conway, Jack, dir. A Tale of Two Cities. MGM, 1935.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. The Oxford Illustrated Dickens. 1949.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
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