Subscribe

Subscribe to our Newsletter and get informed about new publication regulary and special discounts for subscribers!

ILSHS > ILSHS Volume 70 > A Study of Institutions in Dickens’s Bleak House...
< Back to Volume

A Study of Institutions in Dickens’s Bleak House as a Representation of Foucault’s Disciplinary Society

Full Text PDF

Abstract:

This study employs Foucault's views on the strategies of power to analyze that the institutional world of Bleak House makes a disciplinary structure. The intrusion of these institutions in all strata of society in the novel, from the aristocratic Dedlocks to the poor area of Tom-All-Alone shapes a panoptic structure in which everyone is visible through a permanent and omniscient gaze. Under the matrix of various institutions almost all the characters in the novel, directly or indirectly, are trapped and engaged. This study shows the modernity of Dickens views on power relations in society and gives readers new maps to read Bleak House and new perspectives from which to view it.

Info:

Periodical:
International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences (Volume 70)
Pages:
53-61
Citation:
M. Ghadamkheir and M. Mahmoudzadeh, "A Study of Institutions in Dickens’s Bleak House as a Representation of Foucault’s Disciplinary Society", International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, Vol. 70, pp. 53-61, 2016
Online since:
June 2016
Export:
Distribution:
References:

[1] John Stuart Mill, The Spirit of the Age, Frederick A. Von Hayek (Ed. ), Chicago UP, Chicago, (1942).

[2] Lyn Pykett, Dickens and Criticism, in: David Paroissien (Ed. ), A Companion to Charles Dickens, Blackwell Publishing, New York, (2008).

[3] John S. Ransom, Foucault's Discipline: The Politics of Subjectivity. Duke UP, London, (1997).

[4] Barry Smart, Michel Foucault. London, Routledge, (2002).

[5] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan (Trans. ), Vintage Books, New York, (1977).

[6] Lauren M. E. Goodla, Beyond the Panopticon: Victorian Britain and the Critical Imagination., PMLA 118: 3 (2003) 539-556.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1632/003081203x47813

[7] Michel Foucault, Truth and Power, Colin Gordon (Trans. ), Power/knowledge: selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault, Colin Gordon (Ed. ), Pantheon Books, New York, (1980).

[8] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan (Trans. ), Vintage Books, New York, (1977).

[9] Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in: Herbert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Eds. ), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago UP, Chicago, (1983).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/88.3.648

[10] Paul. Ed. Rabinow, The Foucault Reader. Penguin, Harmondsworth, (1984).

[11] Donna Rae Foran, The Rhetoric of Imprisonment in Dickens, PhD diss., Marquette University, 1994. Proquest Digital Dissertations 22 Dec. (2012).

[12] George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, (1988).

[13] George Gissing, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study, Blackie and Sons, London, (1926).

[14] G. K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, Haskell House Publishers, New York, (1970).

[15] Joseph W. Childers, Politicized Dickens: The Journalism of the 1850s, in: John Bowen and Robert L. Patten (Eds. ), Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, (2006).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524200_10

[16] Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Bradbury and Evans, London, 1853.

[17] Jan-Melissa Schramm, Dickens and the law, in: Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature and Theology, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, (2000).

[18] Robert Tracy, Bleak House, in: David Paroissien (Ed. ), A Companion to Charles Dicken, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, (2008).

[19] Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. U of California P, Berkeley, (1988).

Show More Hide
Cited By:
This article has no citations.