Herbert Foltinek: Imagination All Compact: How Did Charles Dickens Compose His Novels? (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, 733: Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Literaturwissenschaft, 25).

• Klaus Peter Jochum

At the end of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus offers a brief description of poetic practice: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact / ... / And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes” (V.i); “compact” meaning “made up” or “composed”. Theseus supplies one of two approaches in Herbert Foltinek’s investigation of Dickens’s narrative technique, the “excess of imagination”. The other approach is “artistic control”; Foltinek finds this conventional, orderly compositional mode often to be at odds with imaginative exuberance.

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