The balance between mechanical and creative writing in 'David Copperfield'.

摘要

This thesis argues that Charles Dickens's novel, David Copperfield, represents writing as an art whose success depends on a dynamic relationship between the mechanical and the creative. The representations of writing in the novel comment on David's and Dickens's work as novelists. In the last section of my thesis, I argue that the novel extends this idea of balance to the ethical dimension of writing. This study is valuable and relevant insofar as it extends recent scholarly insights about the complex work of authorship to moments in the novel that have been neglected.