Three Dickens Novels

In this seminar we will read three novels by one of the most popular novelists of Victorian England, Charles Dickens. Issues that we will examine include growing up and Dickens’s place in the ‘Bildungsroman’ tradition, social transformation, the nature of plot and its temporalities, character and caricature, crime, poverty, race and otherness and the social rôle of fiction. At a time when some versions of the novel were becoming increasingly intellectualized, Dickens was resolutely popular, attention-grabbing, and a stylist of dazzling singularity and peculiarity. We will think on the way about Dickens’s contemporary and modern reception, and his place in the English literary tradition.