Narrating the Prison: Role and Representation in Charles Dickens ...

By showing what associations the prison evokes and by illustrating what aspects of the prison are highlighted in prison metaphors, this study attempts to gain a deeper understanding of how the prison has entered the cultural subconscious. Furthermore, this study looks at metaphors that have so far been neglected by metaphor studies, namely cinematic (or film) metaphors. The book presents a new taxonomy of film metaphors, i.e., the various ways in which films may evoke metaphorical readings, and thus contributes to an area of film studies that is still largely under-researched.

Finally, it is worth noting that many scholars have already dealt with the proto-cinematic quality of Dickens’ novels. However, up until now no study has drawn the obvious thematic and stylistic link between Dickens’ prison novels and prison films of the twentieth century. This book shows how Dickens’ mature fiction anticipates the representation of prisons in twentieth-century novels and films.