On the Significance of the Historical Context in A Tale of Two Cities from the Perspective of New Hi

1. Introduction

 

1.1 A brief introduction of Charles Dickens and A Tale of Two Cities

 

Charles Dickens is the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era, and he remains popular, responsible for some of English literature's most iconic characters. Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England on 7th February 1812, but he spent most of his childhood in London and Kent where he based many of his novels. As the second of eight children in a very poor family, he lived a difficult childhood. Eventually, his father was sent to debtor’s prison, and Dickens himself went to work at the age of twelve to help pay off the family’s debt. This troublesome time scarred Dickens deeply and provided him with substantial material for such stories as Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, andDavid Copperfield. Steeped in social criticism, Dickens’s writing provides a keen, sympathetic chronicle of the plight of the urban poor in nineteenth-century England. During his lifetime, Dickens enjoyed immense popularity, in part because of his vivid characterizations, and in part because he published his novels in installments, making them readily affordable to a greater number of people.

 

A Tale of Two Cities is one of Charles Dickens’s most important representative works. With well over 200 million copies sold, A Tale of Two Cities is among the most famous works of fiction. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows the lives of several protagonists through these events. The most notable are Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. Darnay is a French once-aristocrat who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution despite his virtuous nature, and Carton is a dissipated British barrister who endeavors to redeem his ill-spent life out of his unrequited love for Darnay's wife, Lucie Manette. The novel was published in weekly installments instead of monthly, as with most of his other novels. The first ran in the first issue of Dickens' literary periodical All the Year Round on 30 April 1859. The last ran thirty-one weeks later, on 25 November.

1.2 Literature review

 

Charles Dickens has always been regarded as one of the most famous novelists in the Victoria era, whose works are persistently studied on different kinds of fields by many experts and a number of studies have been conducted on the work ofA Tale of Two Cities at present. Generally speaking, studies focusing on the novel have been taken mainly include the following directions: First, the investigation on the theme of the novel as LIANG Xu-dong does in An Analysis of the Humanistic Theme of A Tale of Two Cities and WANG shuang does in On Humanistic Thinking in A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens; second, the analysis on the words and art structures of the novel, as Liao Xinli does in PragmaticsPermeation in A Tale of Two Cities and HUANG Ting-yue does in On the Esthetics Characteristic of A Tale of Two Cities; third, on the characters of the novel, such as On the Classification of Characters in A Tale of Two Cities by Tian Zi,New Understanding to the Creation of Characters and Value in A Tale of Two Citiesby CONG Juan and On the Misinterpretation of the Character of Marquis St. Evremonde in A Tale of Two Cities by LIANG Xu-dong; fourth, on the historical context which is related to this paper, such as On the French Revolution and the Two Cities in A Tale of Two Cities by Wang Xin-ran and On the Depiction of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities by Wang Ze-wen.#p#分页标题#e#

 

Those experts researching on the historical context of A Tale of Two Citiesmainly discuss the depiction of the French Revolution and the two cities by Charles Dickens. Although they integrate the analysis of the historical context while doing their research, few of them pay much attention to the significance of the historical context especially from the perspective of new historicism. Therefore, the author of this paper explores the very point in order to fill the gap.

 

1.3 Purpose and significance of the study

 

With French and the English society of the years around 18th century as the background, A Tale of Two Cities reveals effectively the novelist's purpose of revealing the injustices of oppression and the social problems of the British society. However, Dickens shows his strong criticism on the excess of bloodshed during the French Revolution, especially in his consideration of the innocent（like Charles Darnay） being punished along with the guilty. He feels that the old ways of oppression must be changed, and that much oppression and much misery will inevitably lead to revolution, but when the revolution actually appears, he thinks that it is too violent and that the less bloodshed, the better. As a historical novel, although the characters in A Tale of Two Citiesare fictitious, the historical context depicted by Charles Dickens is of much significance. Therefore research on the significance of the historical context inA Tale of Two Cities can be worthwhile. This paper is going to explore the significance of the historical context in A Tale of Two Cities from the perspective of new historicism, analyzing the reliable interpretation of the French Revolution, the warnings to the then British society and the constructive solutions to the social problems reflected in the novel.

 

2. Introduction of New Historicism

 

2.1 Basic standpoints of new historicists

The literature critical theory of new historicism is applied throughout the paper. It was a movement that began punctually at the beginning of the 1980s, when the American critic Stephen Greenblatt edited a selection of Renaissance essays and announced that they constituted a “new historicism”. New Historicists aim simultaneously to understand the work through its historical context and to understand cultural and intellectual history through literature, which documents the new discipline of the history of ideas. New Historicism is claimed to be a more neutral approach to historical events, and to be sensitive towards different cultures.

The key concepts of new historicism are as follows:

a. The writing of history is a matter of interpretations, not facts. Thus, all historical accounts are narratives and can be analyzed using many of the tools used by literary critics to analyze narrative.#p#分页标题#e#

b. History is neither linear (it does not proceed neatly from cause A to effect B and from cause B to effect C) nor progressive (the human species is not steadily improving over the course of time).

c. Power is never wholly confined to a single person or to a single level of society. Rather, power circulates in a culture through exchanges of material goods, exchanges of human beings, and most important for literary critics, as we’ll see below, exchanges of ideas through the various discourses a culture produces.

d. There is no monolithic spirit of an age, and there is no adequate totalizing explanation of history. There is only a dynamic, unstable interplay among discourses, the meanings of which the historian can try to analyze, though that analysis will always be incomplete, accounting for only a part of the historical picture.

e. Personal identity----like historical events, texts, and artifacts----is shaped by and shapes the culture in which it emerges. Thus, cultural categories such as normal and abnormal, sane and insane, are matters of definition. Put another way, our individual identity consists of the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves, and we draw the material for our narratives from the circulation of discourses that constitutes our culture.

f. All historical analysis is unavoidably subjective. Historians must therefore reveal the ways in which they know they have been positioned, by their own cultural experience, to interpret history.

2.2 New historicism and literature

 

For traditional literary historians, literature existed in a purely subjective realm, unlike history, which consisted of objectively discernable facts. Therefore, literature could never be interpreted to mean anything that history didn’t authorize it to mean. By contrast, new historicists consider even when traditional historians believe they are sticking to the facts, the way they contextualize those facts determines what story those facts will tell. From this perspective, there is no such thing as a presentation of facts; there is only interpretation. Furthermore, new historicists argue that reliable interpretations, for a number of reasons, difficult to produce. Therefore new historicists consider history a text that can be interpreted the same way literature critics interpret literary texts, and conversely, it considers literary texts cultural artifacts that can tell us something about the interplay of discourse, the web of social meanings, operating in time and place in which those texts were written. The literary text and the historical situation from which it emerged are equally important because text (the literary work) and context (the historical conditions that produced it) are mutually constitutive: they create each other. New historicism stresses the interaction between texts and history. Literary texts may take part in the construction of history.