Queer Dickens

This book offers a radically new reading of Dickens and his major works. It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents a distinctly queer corpus, everywhere fascinated by the diversity of gender roles, the expandability of notions of the family, and the complex multiplicity of sexual desire. The book examines the long overlooked figures of bachelor fathers, maritally resistant men, and male nurses. It explores Dickens's attention to a longing, not to reproduce, but to nurture, his interest in healing touch, and his articulation, over the course of his career, of homoerotic desire. Holly Furneaux places Dickens's writing in a broad literary and social context, alongside authors including Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, Braddon, Collins, and Whitman, to make a case for Dickens's central position in queer literary history. Examining novels, poetry, life-writing, journalism, and legal and political debates, Queer Dickens argues that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and families of choice. Further, it contends that Dickens's portrayals of nurturing masculinity and his concern with touch and affect between men challenge what we have been used to thinking about Victorian ideals of maleness. Queer Dickens intervenes in current debates about the Victorians (neither so punitive nor so prudish as we once imagined) and about the methodologies of the histories of the family and of sexuality. It makes the case for a more optimistic, nurturing, and life-affirming trajectory in queer theory.

This collection of new essays draws attention to the various and complex ways in which scholars and critics have reflected upon and reacted to Charles Dickens’s texts, including his novels, short fiction and journalism. Subsequent to the initial publication of Dickens’s works, writers, visual artists and filmmakers have re-imagined, transposed and transformed them from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Although Reflections on / of Dickens recognizes the writer’s importance as first and foremost a major figure in literature, it nevertheless offers a uniquely vast array of approaches to his literary output, ranging from intertextual and generic strategies, through gender studies, translation studies and comparative literary studies, to issues connected with reception, popular culture, visual culture and performing arts. The diverse thematic preoccupations present in this highly interdisciplinary volume attest to Dickens’s central position in the British canon and his global appeal, while at the same time narrowing the gap between traditional textual analysis and more contextualised readings of his oeuvre, taking into account the socio-cultural and historical circumstances thanks to which his literary reputation continues to flourish.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

This volume of essays examines Dickens's complex representations of sexuality and gender as well as his use of gender ideologies and sexual and gender differences over the course of his literary career, from his first sketches and early novels to his late works of fiction. The essays approach gender issues in Dickens's writing by focusing on a number of topics: his treatment of gender ideals and transgressions; the intersections and displacements among gender, class and race; the ties between gender and the body, and among gender, voice and language; his depiction of the homosocial and the homoerotic; and the relation between gender and the law. The essays provide an introduction to the most recent approaches to Dickens's fiction in addition to those now considered classic, draw on queer theory and also feature a variety of methodologies, ranging across feminist, historicist and psychoanalytic methods of interpretation. The collection represents the best of previously published research by Dickens's scholars and illuminates for students and scholars alike the meaning of gender in such novels as The Pickwick Papers, Dombey and Son, and Our Mutual Friend.

From 1850 to 1867, Charles Dickens produced special issues (called “numbers”) of his journals Household Words and All the Year Round, which were released shortly before Christmas each year. In Collaborative Dickens, Melisa Klimaszewski undertakes the first comprehensive study of these Christmas numbers. She argues for a revised understanding of Dickens as an editor who, rather than ceaselessly bullying his contributors, sometimes accommodated contrary views and depended upon multivocal narratives for his own success. Klimaszewski uncovers connections among and between the stories in each Christmas collection. She thus reveals ongoing conversations between the works of Dickens and his collaborators on topics important to the Victorians, including race, empire, supernatural hauntings, marriage, disability, and criminality. Stories from Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and understudied women writers such as Amelia B. Edwards and Adelaide Anne Procter interact provocatively with Dickens’s writing. By restoring links between stories from as many as nine different writers in a given year, Klimaszewski demonstrates that a respect for the Christmas numbers’ plural authorship and intertextuality results in a new view of the complexities of collaboration in the Victorian periodical press and a new appreciation for some of the most popular texts Dickens published.

From their first appearance in print, Dickens's fictions immediately migrated into other media, and particularly, in his own time, to the stage. Since then Dickens has continuously, apparently inexhaustibly, functioned as the wellspring for a robust mini-industry, sourcing plays, films, television specials and series, operas, new novels and even miniature and model villages. If in his lifetime he was justly called 'The Inimitable', since his death he has become just the reverse: the Infinitely Imitable. The essays in this volume, all appearing within the past twenty years, cover the full spectrum of genres. Their major shared claim to attention is their break from earlier mimetic criteria - does the film follow the novel? - to take the new works seriously within their own generic and historical contexts. Collectively, they reveal an entirely 'other' Dickensian oeuvre, which ironically has perhaps made Dickens better known to an audience of non-readers than to those who know the books themselves.

Liminal Dickens is a collection of essays which cast new light on some surprisingly neglected areas of Dickens’s writings: the rites of passage represented by such transitional moments and ceremonies as birth/christenings, weddings/marriages, and death. Although a great deal of attention has been paid to the family in Dickens’s works, relatively little has been said about his representations of these moments and ceremonies. Similarly, although there have been discussions of Dickens’s religious beliefs, neither his views on death and dying nor his ideas about the afterlife have been analysed in any great detail. Moreover, this collection, arising from a conference on Dickens held in Thessaloniki in 2012, explores how Dickens’s preoccupation with these transitional phases reflects his own liminality and his varying positions regarding some main Victorian concerns, such as religion, social institutions, progress, and modes of writing. The book is composed of four parts: Part One concerns Dickens’s tendency to see birth and death as part of a continuum rather than as entirely separate states; Part Two looks at his unconventional responses to adolescence as a transitional period and to the marriage ceremony as an often unsuccessful rite de passage; Part Three analyses his partial divergence from certain widely held Victorian views about progress, evolution, sanitation, and the provisions made for the poor; and Part Four focuses on two of his novels which are seen as transgressing conventional genre boundaries.

David Copperfield and Great Expectations are among Charles Dickens's most famous novels. In both books, the hero tells the vivid and absorbing tale of his education by life, presents a rich range of characters and scenes, and tackles profound moral, social and psychological themes. Part I of this essential study: - Provides lucid and penetrating analyses of key passages - Discusses the crucial topics of patriarchy, class, obsession, eccentricity, death, breakdown and recovery - Summarizes the methods of analysis and offers suggestions for further work Part II supplies key background material, including: - An account of Dickens's life and works - A survey of historical, cultural and literary contexts - Samples of significant criticism Also featuring a valuable Further Reading section, this volume provides readers with the critical and analytical skills which will enable them to enjoy and explore both novels for themselves.