Dickens in the new millenium

In this bicentennial year of Charles Dickens's birthday, the French journal Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens has decided to celebrate and assess the Inimitable's presence in our times. The aim of this volume is to consider how Dickens's fiction is understood, interpreted and taughr nowadays, and whether it answers twenty-first-century concerns. The essays collected here also examine how today's readers, spectators and Internet users consider the mid-Victorian period through Dickens's writing and its audiovisual adaptations.

The nineteen essays gathered here were written by Dickens specialises from all around the world : Philip V. Allingham, Nancy Aycock Metz, Joël J. Brattin, Laurent Bury, Marianne Camus, Zelma Catalan, André L. Decuir, Clotilde De Stasio, Jennifer Gribble, Nathalie Jaëck, Alain Jumeau, Carole Koepke Brown, Georges Letissier, Chris Louttit, Mario Martino, Wayne Melville, Maria Cristina Paganoni, David Paroissien, Dominic Rainsford, Max Véga-Ritter.

The essays cover areas and issues as varied as how to teach Dickens nowadays, at school, university or via the Internet, how Dickens has been illustrated and adapted, how science and the history of science bring new light to the interpretation of his work today, how reading Dickens may still touch and affect us and how it has revolutionised the notion of reading itself, how his novels and other writings have inspired novelists up to the present day, how the process of Dickens's creation can still give rise to fascinating genetic research, and how Dickens's use of metafictional, archetypal, and prototypical narratives to decipher the signs of his times still resonates with meaning in the twenty-first century, in short, how much the Inimitable is still here with us, at the centre of a Worldwide web of fascinating developments.