Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Critical Missiles and Sympathetic Ink
- 1 Charles Dickens, Uncommercial Space-Time Traveller: Dombey and Son and the Ethics of History
- 2 Other People's Shoes: Realism, Imagination and Sympathy
- 3 The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part I: Sympathy – a Family Affair?
- 4 The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part II: Which Family Values?
- 5 The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part III: ‘The Torn Nest is Pierced by the Thorns’ –Sympathy after the Family
- Envoi: Sympathetic Magic
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Charles Dickens, Uncommercial Space-Time Traveller: Dombey and Son and the Ethics of History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Critical Missiles and Sympathetic Ink
- 1 Charles Dickens, Uncommercial Space-Time Traveller: Dombey and Son and the Ethics of History
- 2 Other People's Shoes: Realism, Imagination and Sympathy
- 3 The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part I: Sympathy – a Family Affair?
- 4 The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part II: Which Family Values?
- 5 The Personal, the Political and the Human, Part III: ‘The Torn Nest is Pierced by the Thorns’ –Sympathy after the Family
- Envoi: Sympathetic Magic
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As the abyss of time widens between judges and defendants, it is always a lesser experience judging a greater … If the spirit of the trial succeeds nothing will remain of us but a memory of …atrocities sung by a chorus of children … Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog in their path. From his present, which was for them the faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear …he sees their mistakes but not the fog …forget[s] what man is …what we ourselves are.
Milan Kundera, Testaments BetrayedVictorian and postmodern collisions
For the central currents of post-colonial and new-historicist criticism, ‘history’, as it is usually thought of, is in every sense the History of the West. As Robert Young puts it, ‘History, with a capital H …cannot tolerate otherness or leave it outside its economy of inclusion. The appropriation of the other as a form of knowledge within a totalising system can thus be set alongside the history (if not the project) of European imperialism’. Young argues that History's linear narrative of logical cause and effect, teleologically tending towards totality, rhetorically occludes other ‘histories’, and rhetorically legitimates the subjugation of other peoples in the cause of ascendant western man's supposedly preordained mission to unite the globe under his rule of enlightenment.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Victorian Fiction and the Insights of SympathyAn Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, pp. 23 - 60Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2007