Dickens' 'Hard Times' vs Orwell's 'Coming Up for Air': Society Critique & Class Relations , Apuntes de Literatura inglesa

¡Descarga Dickens' 'Hard Times' vs Orwell's 'Coming Up for Air': Society Critique & Class Relations y más Apuntes en PDF de Literatura inglesa solo en Docsity! HARD TIMES, Charles Dickens & COMING UP FOR AIR, Orwell. Both texts have in common that describe a place, with dialogues that serve to illustrate the society and relations of that place. The Dickens one presents the social dynamic of the town, a mister is talking. On the second one, the dialogue occours between a shop attender and the boss. They both have, again, in common that express how different social classes interact. Differences: Hard Times (1854) ilustrates 1st Industrial Revolution (1760/1820 more or less): tecnological and scientifical advances that produced social changes. This book appears during the victorian age, and talks about proletarian and middle classes, which is normal in Dickens. He usually writes about London, in some point of his career he starts to place his novels a bit more in the North. It is a time where is appearing a new way to confront life in front of an unfair society: the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels dates from 1848, a few before than HT was published. It presents a different way to aproach the new situation, ways of creating wealth based of a different distribution which thinks about the equality. Marxist criticism, the way of improve society by destroying differences. How different classes interact and how to get them to be equal. Society can be interpretated from an economical point of view, so how can it be transformed? On the text there are presented these differences: factories, the correlation between two classes -> this is the real novel for marxist criticism. Look at the text itself as aa good, a merchandise: at society you have readers that demand good readings, etc. It is not only the book the one that speaks about industry, the book is a product of the industry itself. Even when it’s criticising the middle classes, these are the ones that are able to read and have enough money to spend it in books. Dickens himself was part of this class, but he self-made it: he came from a poor family, had to work when he was a child until he became famous and quite reach because of his publications. Entering into the fragment, we see all the time facts in the description of Coketown, in the sense that every little thing that forms the city is imposible to change (“was a triumph of fact”, “for ever and ever”, “every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow”). What we find is a purely industrial description (numbers, sounds of machines, factories, etc.), and those industrial things are the ones that determinate life of people. We find too images from the jungle in the way of describing, showing that the industrial city is the wildest nature we can find: it is a contrast city- countryside, but also describes perfectly idustrial life. Religion is also present in the description, even the churcs have the same look as everything else, any other building (every building looks the same than the other, more fact). Nothing scapes from the wait of fact. Coming Up for Air (1939): just before the World War 2. In a way, curiously, it is a reflection of how war is arriving. The narrator, a common man, is waiting for something (could it be the war? ), he knows something is going to happen, he says “it is going to happen, is going to be a mascre”: bombs, planes, he thinks about it. We find the same kid of description that we had on HD: fact, routine. An idea that is not present in Dickens but that it is important here is that the system grows a kind of people that are a part of the sistem itself, system produces people that feed the system. Orwell was a democratic socialist, fought at the Spanish Civil War (where he was wounded) and was really desilutioned when he knew more socialists. His political thoughts changes contantly, he’s really critic but still a representant of socialist literature.