Inter-generic Research on Dramatic City Romance and the Early Works of Dickens

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Critical studies on the relationship between Charles Dickens and the drama of the seventeenth-century, Renaissance and Restoration drama, has not been adequately conducted. This research has its origin in the discovery of affinities between Dickens's early works and English drama of seventeenth-and eighteenth-centuries. An attempt has been made to elucidate the origins of theatricality evident in Dickens by making extensive research on primary sources of drama of the seventeenth century, which, it is expected, will lead to the resolution of problems involving cultural and mechanical dynamism which triggered the transfer of dominant literary genre from drama to novel in the early decades of the eighteenth-century. As a result, it has been perceived that a close relationship exists between the growth of the city, an epitome of modern capitalist civilization and transformations of literary genres. An urbanized form of romance was engendered by the affiliation of medieval romance into drama intended for the city audience consisting mainly of apprentices; the urban mercantile class was rapidly expanding with the development of the city. The forest as the locus of romance symbolizes natural desires and instinctive drives of man while the city stands for civilization. Human beings, by changing their dwelling places from the forest to the city, went on to building modern civilization, but at the same time they had inevitably to internalize a fundamental contradiction. The novel as the new, modern form of literature was founded on this basic conflict between the Forest and the City. This study has succeeded in elucidating the dynamism behind the transition from the romance to the novel, stepping beyond the original research on the relationship between Dickens and drama. A perspective is opened for radically rewriting the English literary history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.