|
"The volume comes out of a 2010 Dickens conference at the editors' institution and brings together deceased, senior, mid-career, and a couple of junior Dickens scholars from the Anglophone and German literary critical traditions. During his career as a writer and a public figure, Charles Dickens witnessed unprecedented social and economic changes, becoming ever more dissatisfied with English society as a whole. His works, bursting with restless energy and protean style, registered and commented on the ceaseless changes in the Victorian world. As a documentarian, a melodramatist, a satirist, and a crusading moralist, Dickens both chronicled the transformations around him and advocated for radical changes to British laws and attitudes in order to minimize the malign impact of modern industrial capitalism. Bringing together an international group of Dickens scholars, this volume highlights the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated within Dickens's works. The contributors explore Dickens as an agent of change in four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. In an afterword, Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens changed the life of one eminent Dickensian"-- Repetitions and reversals : patterns for social change in Pickwick papers / Jerome Meckier -- Three revolutions : alternate routes to social change in Bleak house / Joel J. Brattin -- Dickens, society, and art : change in Dickens's view of effecting social reform / Robert Heaman -- The world changing Dickens, Dickens changing the world / Bert Hornback -- Parrots, birds of prey, and snorting cattle : Dickens's Whig agenda / David Paroissien -- The tremendous potency of the small : Dickens, the individual, and social change in a post-America, post-catastrophist age / Nancy Aycock Metz -- Money, power, and appearance in Dombey and son / Michael Hollington -- The passing of the Pickwick moment / Malcolm Andrews -- The chimes and the rhythm of life / Matthias Bauer -- Radical Dickens : Dickens and the tradition of romantic radicalism / Norbert Lennartz -- Modern characters in the late novels of Charles Dickens / Herbert Foltinek -- The cultural politics of Dickens's Hard times / Doris Feldmann -- Conjuring Dickens : magic, intellectual property, and The old curiosity shop / Christopher Pittard -- Popular Dickens : changing Bleak house for the East End stage / Chris Louttit -- The frozen deep : Gad's Hill, June-July 1857 / Robert Tracy -- How to read Dickens in English : a last retrospect / Edgar Rosenberg.
|
