http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/keyword/alfred-tennyson Inquiries Journal provides undergraduate and graduate students around the world a platform for the wide dissemination of academic work over a range of core disciplines. en-us Sat, 09 May 2026 05:57:36 -0400 Sat, 09 May 2026 05:57:36 -0400 http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/926/the-search-for-utopia-charles-dickens-hard-times-and-alfred-tennysons-mariana By Vanessa M. Braganza - Charles Dickens’ Hard Times and Alfred Tennyson’s poem Mariana both invite readers to explore notions of utopia and the ideal setting for human beings. In a remarkably similar rhetorical process, both works present readers with a pair of antithetical settings alongside tragic and comic elements that highlight them as non-ideal. Both writers employ Hazlitt’s principle that “man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be” (269). By inflecting these settings... Mon, 20 Oct 2014 10:30 EDT http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/926/the-search-for-utopia-charles-dickens-hard-times-and-alfred-tennysons-mariana