Unsettling Dickens

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 (from teleological pilgrimages to mad flights), into the perennially changing meanings associated with the term ‘Dickensian' itself. We trust that the broad appeal of our project is reflected in the international and national reputations of our contributors. 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 by offering fresh consideration of some of his lesser-known fictional constructs and his major novels, especially the autofictional ones, and by giving sustained attention in new thematic and interdisciplinary approaches. Contributions by Ray Crosby, Clémence Follea, Jacqueline Fromonot, Louisa Hadley, Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar, Michael Hollington, Simon J. James, Francesca Orestano, Gilbert Pham-Thanh and Michael Slater