/lit/ - Literature

Old, boring, and irrelevant.

Carry on.

>>1167282
But then, could the same not be said of every writer who predates the contemporary era?

untalented faggot paid by the word so he stretches his stories out to ridiculous lengths.

>>1167287

> paid by the word

He wasn't

>>1167287
But what about his shorter works like "A Christmas Carol?" That book was hardly 100 pages.


Even then, I don't find his writing nearly as indulgent and pretentious as other writers (namely Hawthorne).

>>1167287

All writing is tainted by commercialism to some degree. At least Dickens has literary merit.

>>1167291

He may as well been, not even Dostoevsky's work was so fucking bloated.

Also he's simply boring, nothing happens in his books for the length.

>>1167294
But wouldn't you say that, for his time, he did manage to provide some challenging social commentary that was targeted at, and read by a very wide audience?

I don't like Dickens because he overwrote his fiction (paid by the word or not), has characters that are so fucking black and white that it's comical, and lays down such heavy-handed moralizing that it might as well be replaced with a fucking treatise instead of a novel.

>>1167299
Fair points, but at the same time, most of his contemporaries did the same things- stark characters were a pretty run-of-the-mill thing at that time, and when writers did present some kind of moral lesson, the usually laid it on even thicker than Dickens did. Take for example "Uncle Tom's Cabin;" that novel may as well be punching you in the face with its moral lessons and emotional appeals.

>>1167299

Amen. His style leads to no actual thinking for the reader.

And his contemporaries were just as bad, he's just the most popular.

We don't all hate him. I think he's fun to read and like his style, but I think people that don't like him have valid points as well. To each his own.

>>1167309
So it's not so much Dickens himself, it's more that Dickens is the posterboy for an entire period of literature that /lit/ holds in contempt?


Actually, that's a lot easier to accept.

>>1167304
True, very true, which is why I dislike most 18th and 19th Century literature.

>>1167334
That's a sentiment that I can actually sympathize with. I don't care for much literature of the 18th and 19th centuries at all, but Dickens was one of the few authors of the time that I've always had a bit more reverence for.

It's all about late Dickens. I could barely get through Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, but Great Expectations was great.