1。2 Literature Review

Comments about Dickens sprung up early in 1836, and boomed greatly during the Second World War and then came in a throng until now。 But attention from Chinese literary studies arrived late, after Lin Shu had translated five novels of Dickens at the beginning of 20th century。 Traditional scholars mainly pay attention to the relationship between Dickens’s life and his works, and some focus on themes, figures, moral values, writing techniques in his novels。 With tremendously improved research conditions, scholars utilize various research methodologies to interpret Dickens and his works, such as psychological criticism, feminist criticism and post-colonialism theory, and thus forming an integrated system of study。 来,自,优.尔:论;文*网www.youerw.com +QQ752018766-

Hard Times, the novel discussed in this paper, is perhaps the least-known of all Dickens’s novels。 When first published in 1854, it was marked by contemporary reviews as a rare failure, considered to be variously misguided in its politics, satirically off-target and philosophically muddled。 Accordingly, commenters often ignored Hard Times in critical surveys of Dickens’s works。 The single critical accolade of Hard Times appeared in 1860 in a paper of John Ruskin, who stated that it was “the greatest Dickens has written” (Person, 1996: 146)。 This words received no support until 1931 Bernard Shaw praised Hard Times as “an ‘enormous’ increase in Dickens’s strength and intensity as a writer” (Person, 1996: 146)。 The circumstance of its critical drubbing changed in 1947 when F。 R。 Leavis, the Dickens scholar in particular, concurred with Ruskin and Shaw in his essay Hard Times: An Analytic Note。 It claims Hard Times as Dickens’s “masterpiece” that has “all the strength of Dickens genius, together with a strength no other of them can show—that of a completely serious work of art” (Person, 1996: 148)。 The watershed in the critical history of Hard Times was reached and the mid to late twentieth century witnessed the prosperity of the researches on Hard Times。 Subsequent commentators have found merit in the novel, explaining it from aspects such as its social-protest theme, persified artistic features, focusing upon issues of gender, labor-capital relations, and politics。 The research focuses of Hard Times in China are similar to it abroad。 Generally speaking, Hard Times is viewed as a relentless indictment of the callous greed of the Victorian industrial society and its misapplied utilitarian philosophy。 Hence numerous researchers naturally pay attention to the theme of the novel。 Wang Yanjun (2008) commented that utilitarianism destructed human nature and gave rise to the tragedy of characters。 Some scholars think highly of its artistic features。 Han Zhenheng (1993) summarized Dickens’s usage of many writing techniques of “anti-facts,” which was itself a critique of “utilitarian philosophy。” 

Although there are already a few researches on this novel, Hard Times still has lots to be discovered。 No matter in the west or in China, works of Charles Dickens, including Hard Times, are generally supposed to be realistic and adult, being studied corresponding to Dickens’s status as a serious novelist。 However, people recently have noticed that Dickens implicates a romantic fairy-tale world in his works more or less。 George Sampson in 1942 and Harry Stone in 1979 both mentioned the fairy tale mode of Dickens in his masterpieces。 Scholar Michael C。 Kotzin explored Dickens’s fairy tale complex in 1972 and C。D。 Manson analyzed how the fairy tale literature of Dickens served as antidotes to the Victorian spiritual crisis in 2008。 They considered his works as romantic realism, which are full of the poetic passion and remarkable imagination (钱青, 2006: 289)。 Domestic researchers have also touched upon Dickens’s fairy tale complex from different aspects, including the perspective of children’s psychology, its reasons and its fairy-tale characteristics。 Nevertheless, theses on this field are few and scattered, concerning only with some previous works of Dickens。 The fairy tale colour of characters in Hard Times has scarcely been discussed systematically and still calls for future study。