A Christmas Dinner by Charles Dickens and Nigella Lawson

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, grade: 1, Dublin City University, language: English, abstract: These two texts are descriptions of Christmas dinners. The first one is a literary one, an excerpt taken out of Charles Dickens' novel 'A Christmas Carol', first published in 1843. The second one is an introduction to a collection of recipes in an online blog by Nigella Lawson from 2012. Even though it might seem at first that they are quite similar texts as they are both about the same specific event, there are a lot of differences to be found. This essay will discuss the differences and similarities between the two texts and analyse and compare them using a number of theories of textual analysis: Karl Bühler's Organon Model, Paul Grice's Conversational Maxims, and Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hassan's Context of Situation. It should be noted that even when the vocabulary used has a slightly negative connotation, for example flouting or lack of, this in no way means that one text is superior to the other or that the aspect mentioned is in fact a negative one. The vocabulary used is only to describe and analyse, not to judge the two texts.