Unsettling Dickens

Unsettling Dickens

Process, Progress and Change

Unsettling Dickens opens opportunities to reorient Dickens readers to new ways of responding to concepts we associate with his prose writing and the novel form itself. Through exploring motion and change, understood both contextually and comparatively, the authors here challenge established critical approaches and provide fresh insights into the aesthetics of reading and writing, into how the Dickensian narrative structures and undermines literal and metaphorical travel, into the perennially changing meanings associated with the term 'Dickensian' itself.

Selected from papers presented at the 2012 bicentenary 'travelling' conference, which itself progressed from Paris to London, the collection includes contributions from leading Dickensian scholars as well as from the best of a new generation of Victorianist scholars. The essays gathered seek both to reposition Dickens as a major representative of English mid-Victorian aesthetics and to disrupt his monumental status. They offer fresh consideration of some of his lesser-known fictional constructs and his major novels, especially the autofictional ones, and give sustained attention to new thematic and interdisciplinary approaches.