Difference between revisions of "Bowen & Patten 2006"

Latest revision as of 10:28, 23 May 2017

Bowen, John and Robert L. Patten, eds. Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.

Introduction

• 1: ...the multiple and overlapping dialogues that he had with his readers - as novelist, editor, autobiographer, reporter, and sage.
• 3: Great Expectations' autobiographical story takes apart, deconstructs almost, the triumphant story of self-making told by his earlier autobiographical novel and "favourite child," David Copperfield.
• Serial publication and illustrated novels were given a decisive new impetus by Dickens's work; in generic terms he pioneered such diverse forms as the Christmas book, the ghost story, the social problem novel, and the detective novel; as an author, editor, and shrewd defender of his own economic interests, he made major changes in the social and economic conditions under which he and other authors wrote and published. His C19 readers would have encountered him in a bewildering variety of forms - in journalism, weekly or monthly magazines, monthly pamphlets, illustrations, advertisements, borrowed or bought one- or three-volume novels, stage adaptations, public readings, pirated editions, translations, and unlicensed continuations and adaptations. A renewed attention to these material contexts (from popular theater and printing technology to copyright law) and the significance of his innovations within them has given us a much more complex and nuanced sense of his career and its significance.
• 7: The revival of political liberalism in the final decades of the C20, the recognition of the intimate intertwining of political power and social discipline, and the centrality of questions of gender and sexuality to contemporary political life and thought have, paradoxically enough, in several ways brought Dickens closer to us. The questions he wrestled with, both as a writer and citizen...have come to appear increasingly important to our understanding of modern society and its acts of self-definition.
• para on 8-9 about time in No Thoroughfare and the fiction more generally

Ch 1 Publishing in Parts (Robert L. Patten)

• 14 Hablot Knight Browne's first pseudonym in the Pickwick era (before Phiz) was NEMO, like Captain Hawdon in Bleak House (1853)
• 17-8 good overview of structures for mid-Victorian serial author payment (and Dickens negotiating "the best of all worlds")
• 23 add another element to Great Expectations' temporal complexity: D planned the encounter with Magwitch in the graveyard in the first number to appear in the 1 December 1860 issue of All the Year Round