A Study Of The Crowds In Charles Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens' most important historical novel.It takes the French Revolution as the background and subject,and presents a rather vivid picture of the French society before and during the French Revolution and expounds Dickens' view of this world-shaking and far-reaching event.For a long time,the studies on this novel have been focused on the writing thoughts,characters,writing skills,the sources of Dickens' description of the novel,and his attitude towards the French Revolution.With an overview of the previous studies,there are hardly any scholars who have studied the crowd in the novel in China.As for the foreign scholars,some have just briefly mentioned the mob,which is a part of the crowd,such as the mob violence represented by Madame Defarge,and the novel as representation of mob violence.However,there are no comprehensive and detailed studies of the crowd in the novel.Thus,this leaves a room to reconsider and delve into the subject of the crowd.By the aid of the French psychologist and sociologist Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind,this thesis will conduct an in-depth study of the crowds in A Tale of Two Cities from the perspective of crowd psychology.This thesis comprises four main chapters,the introduction and the conclusion.The introduction gives a brief description of Charles Dickens' life and the plot of A Tale of Two Cities,reviews the history and present situation of researches on A Tale of Two Cities at home and abroad and puts forward the central argument,research method and significance of the thesis.Chapter One provides the concept of the crowd and states some basics of crowd psychology.Chapter Two classifies and analyzes the crowds in A Tale of Two Cities,including the casual crowd,the conventional crowd,the expressive crowd and the acting crowd.Chapter Three mainly discusses the causes of the behavior of crowds in the novel in terms of psychological motivation,French national character,and socio-economic factors.Chapter Four analyzes Dickens' attitude towards the crowds in the novel.The conclusion summarizes and generalizes the whole thesis.