Pigmies and Brobdignagians

This essay argues that Charles Dickens's “larger than life” characters were critically shaped by the Victorians' increasing doubts about the life-size as a visual standard in painting and sculpture. Departing from a tendency to read Dickens's excesses as the products of larger thematic design or as the results of structural exigency, this essay proposes instead that his famously “static” and “flat” characters were significantly influenced by debates about static and flat forms of art. In novels like Bleak House (1852–53) and Little Dorrit (1855–57), Dickens investigated contemporary commentators' assertions that the perception of the “size of life” was a trick of the eye. Ultimately, his investigations went beyond exploration and were transformed into practice. What we have long taken as characterological exaggeration should in fact be reread as an effort to encapsulate lived visual experience

Aesthetics · Art · Character (mathematics · Epistemology · Exaggeration · Literature · Painting · Perception · Psychoanalysis · Sculpture · Visual arts · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Philosophy · Psychology

• The One vs. the Many

  Alex Woloch•One vs. the Many•2004

  Añadir item

• Knowing the past

  Olivia Harris•Counterworks•2003

  Añadir item

• The Cambridge Companion to Foucault

  Open Access•Thomas Flynn, George Canguilhem et al.•The Cambridge companion to Foucault•1994

  Añadir item

• The Royal Academy

  Open Access•Philip Hagreen•Blackfriars•1920

  Añadir item