To Kill a Text: The Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens, and ZolaIn a unique demonstration of the critical possibilities of Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, To Kill a Text: The Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens, and Zola analyzes the intertextual conflicts between four monuments of nineteenth-century fiction: Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, Charles Dicken's Bleak House, and Emile Zola's Le Ventre de Paris and Germinal. The book's fundamental hypothesis is that Dickens and Zola exemplify Hugo's conception of the novel - and of literary history - as a "graft" of one work upon another, producing hybrid mixtures of genres and styles of representation. For Hugo, a new work always "kills" its predecessor while at the same time preserving its memory. Thus writing becomes inlaid with writing; the text, a palimpsest. |
Contents
Acknowledgments | 9 |
Bakhtins Dialogue with Hugo | 33 |
The Hybrid Novel | 47 |
Copyright | |
7 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
To Kill a Text: The Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens, and Zola Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston Limited preview - 1995 |
Common terms and phrases
ambiguous architecture artistic Babel Bakhtin becomes beginning Bleak House calls carnival cathedral chapter characters church Claude complex concept connection critics dead death Dedlock dialogic Dickens Dickens's discourse elements epic Esther Etienne example existence expression face fact familiar final French genre Germinal gives Gothic graft grotesque Halles hand Hugo Hugo's human hybrid imagination important influence interpretation kind Lady language literary literature living London looks meaning metaphor miners mirror narration narrative nature Notre-Dame de Paris novel opposition original past play plot present Press reading realism reality reference reflected relation relationship represented rewriting rhetoric romantic scene seems sense similar social speech story structure style symbol takes theme theory things thought tion Tower trace tradition tuera University Ventre de Paris Victor Hugo voice writing Zola Zola's