مشخصات پژوهش

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is one of the most important figures in the history of English literature. He was a prolific writer and wrote several social novels. Dickens’ early life and family had a profound effect on his literary career and his writing. Dickens covered a wide variety of motifs and themes in his novels including social injustice and poverty, institutionalized poverty, education system, urban poverty, discrimination, and crime. Moreover, he was an important critic of industrialism and capitalism. He represented in his novels this idea that human beings were oppressed by capitalization and they are economic units instead of humans. One of the most important novels that Dickens wrote is Oliver Twist. It was written between 1837-39 and it relates the story of a boy, Oliver Twist, who runs away from an orphanage and entered the crime world. The present study aims to represent social injustice, discrimination, and crime in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist through a Marxist study. This study can be significant because it attempts to show that capitalist structures are important because they shape the social agitations and the behavior of the characters; said differently, a Marxist reading of the text would unravel the influence of capitalism and the means and relations of production. This thesis will elaborate on the role of literature in Victorian society. For doing so, a Marxist reading of Oliver Twist would be beneficial and this thesis will add new insights into Dickens’ scholarship. A Marxist analysis of the novel will give us a new insight into the deep layers of the novel and this opportunity would be useful for discovering elements of discrimination, poverty, crime, and social injustice in the Victorian society.