The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens

Description

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.

About the author

John O. Jordan is Research Professor of Literature and Director of the Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Supposing Bleak House (University of Virginia Press, 2011). He edited The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens (2001) and has co-edited several essay collections on Victorian Literature and on Dickens, most recently Global Dickens (Ashgate 2012).

Robert L. Patten writes primarily about Victorian literature, graphic arts, and print culture. He has co-edited volumes of essays on Dickens with John O. Jordan (Literature in the Marketplace, Cambridge, 1995) and John Bowen (Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, Palgrave, 2006). His books on Dickens include Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978; 2nd edn. enlarged, 2017) and the Colby prize winning Charles Dickens and "Boz": The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author, Cambridge, 2012). His two-volume biography, George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art (Rutgers, 1992, 1996) was named the best biography of the 1990s by the Guardian. And for the Ashgate Library of Essays on Charles Dickens, a 6-volume series edited by Catherine Waters, he edited the volume on Dickens and Victorian Print Culture (2012).

Catherine Waters is Professor of Victorian Literature and Print Culture at the University of Kent. She is the author of Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate, 2008). She is series editor of the 6-volume collection, A Library of Essays on Charles Dickens (Ashgate, 2012) and has co-edited several essay collections devoted to Dickens, the most recent being Dickens and the Imagined Child, co-edited with Peter Merchant (Ashgate, 2015). She is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Dickens Journals Online project and a vice-president of the Canterbury branch of the Dickens Fellowship.

Table of contents

Dickens Timeline
Dickens Family Tree
Introduction
Part I: Personal and Professional Life
1:Biographical Dickens, Rosemarie Bodenheimer
2:Dickens's Lifetime Reading, Leon Litvack
3:Dickens as Professional Author, John Bowen
4:Dickens as a Public Figure, Tony Williams
Part II. The Works
5:Dickens's Early Sketches, Paul Schlicke
6:Pickwick Papers: The Posthumous Life of Writing, Jeremy Tambling
7:Oliver Twist: Urban Aesthetics and the Homeless Child, Galia Benziman
8:Nicholas Nickleby: Equity vs. Law, Jon Varese
9:The Old Curiosity Shop and Master Humphrey's Clock, Sarah Winter
10:Barnaby Rudge and the Jesuit Menace, Mark Eslick
11:Martin Chuzzlewit, Logan Delano Browning
12:Dombey and Son and the Question of Reproduction, Michal P. Ginsburg
13:Christmas Books and Stories, Ruth Glancy
14:David Copperfield, Philip Davis
15:Bleak House, Kate Flint
16:Hard Times for Our Times, Grahame Smith
17:Little Dorrit, Francesca Orestano
18:A Tale of Two Cities, Nathalie Vanfasse
19:Great Expectations, Mary Hammond
20:Our Mutual Friend, Ian Duncan
21:The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Peter Orford
22:'Milestones on the Dover Road': Dickens and Travel, Michael Hollington
23:Journalism and Correspondence, Hazel Mackenzie
24:Charles Dickens and the 'Dark Corners' of Children's Literature, Molly Clark Hillard
Part III: The Socio-Historical Contexts
25:The Trouble with Angels: Dickens, Gender, and Sexuality, James Eli Adams
26:Domesticity and Queer Theory, Holly Furneaux
27:Psychology, Psychiatry, Mesmerism, Dreams, Insanity, and Psychoanalytic Criticism, Tyson Stolte
28:Dickens and Astronomy, Biology, and Geology, Jonathan Smith
29:Social Reform, David Vincent
30:Dickens, Industry, and Technology, Richard Menke
31:Material Culture, Claire Wood
32:Dickens and Affect, Wendy Parkins
33:History and Change: Dickens and the Past, David Paroissien
34:Class and its Distinctions, Chris Vanden Bossche
35:Race, Imperialism, Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, and Cosmopolitanism, James Buzard
36:Dickens, Political Economy, and Money, Ayse Çelikkol
37:Dickens and Animal Studies, Jennifer McDonell
38:Dickens and the Environment, Allen MacDuffie
39:Dickens and Religion, Jennifer Gribble
40:Drinking in Dickens, Helena Michie
41:Cognitive Dickens, Chip Badley and Kay Young
Part IV: The Literary and Cultural Contexts
42:Dickens's Language, Daniel Tyler
43:Genres: Auctor Ludens, or Dickens at Play, Robert Tracy
44:Dickens and the Theatre, John Glavin
45:Dickens's Visual Mediations, Helen Groth
Part V: Dickens Re-Visioned
46:Dickens's World System: Globalized Modernity as Combined and Uneven Development, Paul Young
47:Dickens's Global Circulation, Regenia Gagnier
48:Adopting and Adapting Dickens Since 1870: Stage, Film, Radio, Television, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman
49:Crowdsourced Dickens: Adopting and Adapting Dickens in the Internet Age, Juliet John
Index