Charles Dickens as an agent of change

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Summary

"The volume comes out of a 2010 Dickens conference at the editors' institution and brings together deceased, senior, mid-career, and a couple of junior Dickens scholars from the Anglophone and Germ...

"The volume comes out of a 2010 Dickens conference at the editors' institution and brings together deceased, senior, mid-career, and a couple of junior Dickens scholars from the Anglophone and German literary critical traditions. During his career as a writer and a public figure, Charles Dickens witnessed unprecedented social and economic changes, becoming ever more dissatisfied with English society as a whole. His works, bursting with restless energy and protean style, registered and commented on the ceaseless changes in the Victorian world. As a documentarian, a melodramatist, a satirist, and a crusading moralist, Dickens both chronicled the transformations around him and advocated for radical changes to British laws and attitudes in order to minimize the malign impact of modern industrial capitalism. Bringing together an international group of Dickens scholars, this volume highlights the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated within Dickens's works. The contributors explore Dickens as an agent of change in four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. In an afterword, Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens changed the life of one eminent Dickensian"-- Provided by publisher.

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