The Prosaism of Modernity and the Novelistic Prose through the Example of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities

Abstract

This article proposes that prose and, more specifically, novelistic prose as a modern literary form and its affordances bear a connection with the notion of prosaism understood as a range of experiences determined by the conditions of modernity in Western societies. Within this range, the tensions between the individual and the collectivity, especially in the form of the urban anonymous multitude, are of particular interest. Thus, the article first deals with the notion of the prosaism of modernity in its relationship with literary prose. Next, it discusses a number of theoretical and critical perspectives related to the affordances of the novel that have allowed it to dramatize the contradictory position of the individual, as posited by liberalism, and to evoke the form of his/her subjectivity through devices like characterization, free indirect style, focalization, among others. Finally, the article presents a reading of the character Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities and his notional connections with the model of the individual.