Novels, Society and History
'The growth of industry was accompanied by an economic philosophy which celebrated the pursuit of profit and undervalued the lives of workers'.
How do the novelist describe this in their novels?
The description of novelist:
(i)Charles Dickens in his novel 'Hard Times' describes Coketown, a fictitious industrial town, as a grim place full of machinery, smoking chimneys, rivers polluted purple and buildings that all looked the same.
(ii)Here workers are known as ‘hands’, as if they had no identity other than as operators of machines.
(iii)Dickens criticised not just the greed for profits but also the ideas that reduced human beings into simple instruments of production
(iv)In other novels too, Dickens focused on the terrible conditions of urban life under industrial capitalism. His 'Oliver Twist' is the tale of a poor orphan who lived in a world of petty criminals and beggars.
(v)Emile Zola’s 'Germinal' on the life of a young miner in France explores in harsh detail the grim conditions of miners’ lives.
Sponsor Area
Outline the changes in technology and society which led to an increase in the readers of the novel in the eighteenth century Europe.
Write a note on:
The Oriya novel
Write a note on:
Jane Austen's portrayal of women
Write a note on:
The picture of the new middle class which the novel Pariksha-Guru portrays.
Discuss some of the social changes in nineteenth-century Britain which Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens wrote about.
Summarise the concern in both nineteenth-century Europe and India about women reading novels. What does this suggest about how women were viewed?
In what ways was the novel in colonial India useful for both the colonisers as well as the nationalists?
Describe how the issue of caste was included in novels in India. By referring to any two novels, discuss the ways in which they tried to make readers think about existing social issues.
Describe the ways in which the novel in India attempted to create a sense of pan-Indian belonging.
Imagine that you are a historian in 3035 A.D. You have just located two novels which were written in the twentieth century. What do they tell you about society and customs of the time?
Sponsor Area
Sponsor Area