Endüstri romanı: Shirley, Hard Times ve North and South

The aim of this study is to analyze Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849), Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854) and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855) as industrial novels from a New Historicist perspective to explore the interaction between the novels and the industrial discourse, and to analyze how the novels portray and subvert the industrial discourse. The Victorian era was a period of radical changes in terms of social, political and economic issues. Aligned with the Industrial Revolution in Victorian England, these changes include the growing gap between the middle class and the working class, Chartism, mechanization, the conditions in industrial cities, the capitalist ideology, the clash between the private and the public sphere, the oppressed of the society –women and workers –, etc. To lessen the gap between the classes in an atmosphere of social unrest, industrial novels emerged. Industrial novels, which focused on the social problems of the period, touched upon ignored and slightly-covered issues of the time. In this study, Shirley by Charlotte Brontë, Hard Times by Charles Dickens and North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell will be analyzed as social and cultural products of the Victorian era in order to enlighten the problems of industrialism between the years 1845-1855. Because texts are regarded as social and cultural products and documents of their time according to New Historicists, it is obvious that these three novels, produced in the Victorian era, represent the industrial ideology appropriately. Reading these novels with a historical awareness makes the novels themselves historical documents, which shed light on the conditions of Victorian England. What will also be highlighted in this study is how these novels dramatize, reflect and try to change the tensions of social and labour relations. Within this context, whether these novels contribute to a social transformation or not is a highly important question which is fundamentally provided in this thesis.