Realism revisited – Dickens’ Hard Times as a narrativized archive
Realism revisited – Dickens’ Hard Times as a narrativized archive

Summary/Abstract: The paper seeks to demonstrate that the novel Hard Times (1854) by Charles Dickens is an archive in narrative form. The analysis of different discourses on multiple levels of the novel aims at uncovering a collection of voices that follow the formal arch of the plot, but refuse to merge into one authorial statement, or to form temporary “understandings” in order to establish communicative links as joint grounds to mediate between voices or protagonists. The method will follow Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism to identify singular voices and to point to the relationships among them. The realism of socio-historic discourses from Dickens’ Hard Times consequently enables us to rethink the transformation from realistic to the later forms of the novel. Also, the narrative preserving its source material as in an archive is one answer to the open questions of literature in the context of the new media, where the author is often forced to acknowledge a high level of autonomy to the elements of which his or her cybertext consists.

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