首页
登录
职称英语
There is an immediacy about Charles Dickens’s life, just as there is about h
There is an immediacy about Charles Dickens’s life, just as there is about h
游客
2024-12-24
23
管理
问题
There is an immediacy about Charles Dickens’s life, just as there is about his novels, a kind of bursting physicality. "If I couldn’t walk fast and far, " he once said, "I think I should explode and perish." He exhilarated and exhausted himself. Both these biographies, timed for the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth, bring out the mad energy of the man.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst sets out to counter what he sees as the literary man-of-destiny version of Dickens, to recover the uncertainty, muddle and loose ends. He concentrates therefore on the early unsettled years, up to 1838 when, at 26, Dickens decided to sign himself "Charles Dickens". Until then he had just been "Boz", a sketch writer and the hugely popular author of "The Pickwick Papers".
But writing was hardly a proper job. Since the age of 15, he had been racing through more plausible alternatives: from legal clerk, to courtroom and parliamentary shorthand reporter, then on to journalism and ambitions in the theatre. Mr. Douglas-Fairhurst’s early cut-off date enables him to slow these years down, to listen for the echoes between the life and the writings and to draw on a broad range of contemporary references.
As he shows, the question of alternatives, of the road taken or not taken, fascinated Dickens. "See how near I may have been to another sort of life, " he wrote of himself at 20 when he had been on the point of auditioning as an actor. Or, more fearfully, he wrote of his 12-year-old self: "1 might easily have been...a little robber or a little vagabond." He came that close, he believed, when his father (the model for Mr. Micawber in "David Copperfield") was imprisoned for debt and, as was customary, the family joined him—except for young Charles who took lodgings and was set to work in a blacking factory.
It was the defining trauma of his life. It opened the crack in his imagination through which he saw, a hair’s breadth away, a whole world of other sorts of life: from the man next to him in the library, in his Boz sketch "Shabby-genteel People", who blacked his clothes to hide the frays, to the terrified criminal in the condemned cell in "A Visit to Newgate", just feet away from a whistling passer-by.
Mr. Douglas-Fairhurst covers much ground, but one of his central ideas is Dickens’s pervasive sense of what might have been. He sees it in the false trails and shadow plots (take "Great Expectations", where Pip imagines himself in one story though is really in another), in his doublings among characters and in his jostling possibilities and competing outcomes (for instance in "A Christmas Carol").
"Becoming Dickens" is an ingenious, playful and often brilliant analysis as much as it is a narrative. In a sense, Claire Tomalin’s enormous task is more straightforward. She tells a story. Clear-eyed, sympathetic and scholarly, she spreads the whole canvas, alive with incident and detail, with places and people. She writes of publishers, illustrators, collaborators and all Dickens’s intersecting circles of friends and family. It is wonderfully done.
Mr. Douglas-Fairhurst observes that almost nothing can be said of Dickens of which the opposite is not also true. Ms Tomalin richly bears that out. Here is the loyal friend and philanthropist, the champion of the poor—and also the bully. Here too is the man who could light up a room, the clown, the mimic and dancer of hornpipes—but also the obsessive who prowled the streets unable to "get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds".
After his death, Dickens’s daughter Katey said that she had loved him immeasurably, but that he was "a wicked man". She was thinking of her mother Catherine, so passive, so overlooked and so constantly pregnant (they had ten children). Having decided she was the wrong wife for him, Dickens literally partitioned off her bed, then forced her into a separation while mocking her to their friends. Ms Tomalin takes care to notice Catherine and the other women in Dickens’s life. Power was vital to him, the power to make his public laugh and cry and love him for it—better still, to see them do it at his famous public readings. But a brutal streak went with it.
Ms Tomalin ends with an exhausted Dickens splashing his head in a bucket of water, and writing on. After all, it is the writer she is interested in, his range, invention and universality. Everyone read him in his lifetime, high and low. Speaking of Pickwick, she remarks that Dickens seemed to feed his story "directly into the bloodstream of the nation...making his readers feel he was a personal friend to each of them." When he died, among the flowers at his graveside in Westminster Abbey were small bunches tied with rags. [br] Which of the following contains a metaphor?
选项
A、...playful and often brilliant analysis as much as it is a narrative.
B、...sympathetic and scholarly, she spreads the whole canvas.
C、...the champion of the poor and also the bully.
D、...in his jostling possibilities and competing outcomes.
答案
B
解析
修辞题。按照试题顺序及选项内容定位至第六至八段。第七段第三句和第四句指出“She tells a story,Clear—eyed,sympathetic and scholarly,she spreads the whole canvas,alive with incident and detail,with places and people.”,该句简要概述了Claire Tomalin写的狄更斯传记的风格,句中的spreads the whole canvas是暗喻手法,指展示其生活全景,故[B]为答案。
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3882533.html
相关试题推荐
______istheworkthatfirstmadeCharlesDickensapopularwriterofnovels.A、
CharlesDickenstakestheFrenchRevolutionasthebackgroundofthenovelA、ATa
CharlesDickensdescribestheChartistMovementinhisnovelnamed______.A、ATal
UndertheruleofCharlesII,EnglishseizedthecolonyonManhattanIslandfrom
TheVictorianAgewaslargelyanageof____,eminentlyrepresentedbyDickensan
TheVictorianAgewaslargelyanageof______,eminentlyrepresentedbyDickens
Thebackgroundof______,anovelbyCharlesDickens,issetintheFrenchRevol
OnthedayaftertheJapaneseattackonPearlHarbor,RepresentativeCharles
WhichofthefollowingisNOTofBritishorigin?A、CharlesDarwinB、FlorenceNigh
______takesLondonasthesettinginmostofhisnovels.A、DickensB、HardyC、Thac
随机试题
关于著作权,说法正确的有( )。A.著作权也称版权 B.未发表的作品不享有著
Text3OliviaPedersenthoughttheNissa
A. B. C. D.
女性,26岁,痛经3年,进行性加重,经量无明显增加,经期延长了2~3天,已婚3年
临床疑为DIC,应选择下列哪组筛选试验A.PT、APTT、血小板计数 B.血小
投资机会研究分为一般投资机会研究和()。A、详细研究 B、粗略研究 C
马克思主义之所以具有与时俱进的品格是因为( ) A.它是一个开放的体系 B
内环境包括A.组织液 B.血浆 C.消化液 D.淋巴液
主治风热咳嗽的中成药有A.急支糖浆 B.橘红丸 C.川贝止咳露 D.蛇胆川
男,50岁。右下后牙冷酸食及刷牙时酸痛感,刺激去除后酸痛感立即消失。检查:右下颌
最新回复
(
0
)