Tyler 2013

Tyler, Daniel, ed. Dickens's Style. Cambridge: UP, 2013. Print.

Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. "Dickens's Rhythms."

• 73: Wonderful temporal complexity of a passage from Adam Bede: "But Adam's thoughts of Hetty...as no other form of worship would have done."
• 74: Hardy, "The Impercipient: At a Cathedral Service" - playing with hymn common metre to show doubt
• 75: In prose, similarly, the timing of a line on the page can show the pressures of historical circumstance coming up against those of custom, routine, habit. To borrow Gertrude Stein's distinction, prose rhythm can reveal significant overlaps and slippages between 'the time of the composition' and 'the time in the composition.'
• Dickens was as ambivalent about the past as he was about most of the present, and his skill at combining a tone of sturdy common sense with an unpredictable flexibility of attitude makes it hard to characterize him as 'purely' anything [resp. to Ruskin calling him "a pure modernist"].
• 76 [Dickens writing] "my composition is peculiar; I can never write with effect - especially in the serious way - until I have got my steam up, or in other words until I have become so excited with my subject that I cannot leave off." [Letters, I, 97] ...At such moments, Dickens's writing can again sound oddly like a declaration of loyalty to an age of mechanical reproduction, as if he were not content merely to take advantage of the newly mechanized world of printing and distribution but wanted to incorporate it into his prose, to make every part of a book's life beat in time together.
• 77: [Narratological rhythm] ...although Mieke Bal points out that 'Rhythm is as striking as it is elusive', when she wants to demonstrate what she means by the term, namely the relationship between what a narrative dwells on and what it elides or arrests, she turns to the opening of Oliver Twist, which devotes three pages to Oliver's birth, just over a page to his childhood up to the age of nine and then several pages ot the moment he announces, "Please, sir, I want some more." It is an imaginative double helix of generosity and restraint that is sunk into every level of Dickens's writing, from his syntax to his methods of serialization.
  • Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Study of Narrative