Music And Community Building In Hard Times

The present thesis seeks to shed light on the relationship between music and community building in Charles Dickens' Hard Times.In 2007,Phyllis Weliver published a book entitled The Musical Crowd in English Fiction,1840-1910 Class,Culture and Nation to discuss the major music scenes/events in British novels,among which Hard Times is used as one of the examples,but Weliver only mentions the novel briefly.Professor Yin Qiping has furthered the discussion,in one of his recently published articles,by exploring the relationship between music scenes/events and community building,but he,too,fails to devote adequate space to Hard Times in his exposition.There is one inspiring notion in his article,however,which we can use to pinpoint Dickens' contribution to community building,namely the notion of culture of feelings.In other words,the former Dickens studies have touched upon either the imagery of music or the novelist's concern for the formation of community,but they have failed to come up with an adequate treatment of music in Hard Times in terms of its role in community building.The present thesis,therefore,proposes to further develop the notion of culture of feelings,and to analyze Dickens' contribution to community building from the perspective of music.In order to achieve the goal,this thesis mainly focuses on the two aspects of Hard Times,namely the music imagery and the underlying imagined community.Applying the concept of the public sphere,the first chapter of this thesis compares Coke Town,which represents the administration philosophy(utilitarianism)and administration method(panopticon),with Sleary's Circus,which epitomizes the public sphere.The second chapter analyzes the main characters in Hard Times,thus trying to throw insight into the underlying factors of their different destinies and into the the culture of feelings that helps to shape character formation.