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The Other Dickens: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Contexts
International Conference: 6-8 July 2012
Centre for Studies in Literature, University of Portsmouth
Keynote Speakers: Professor Jay Clayton (Vanderbilt University), Professor Ann Heilmann (University of Hull), Professor Cora Kaplan (Queen Mary, University of London), Professor Lillian Nayder (Bates College) and Professor Gail Turley-Houston (University of New Mexico)
‘The Other Dickens: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Contexts’ is an interdisciplinary conference which will form part of Portsmouth’s bicentenary celebrations of Dickens’s birth in the city on 7 February 1812. We invite scholars working in the fields of literature, film, history, cultural and media studies to consider the other Dickens – those aspects of Dickens (both of his life and work) that remain relatively unexplored, or require re-evaluation. Our objective is to foster interaction between Victorian and contemporary scholars in order to re-examine Dickens in his Victorian context; to assess his continuing importance in contemporary culture, in film and television adaptations, on the internet, and as a character in neo-Victorian fiction; and to explore the rising interest in Dickens’s family members and associated figures (e.g. Ellen Ternan, Catherine Dickens, née Hogarth) in biography and biofiction. Conference participants will be invited to challenge popular perceptions of Victorian Dickens and to explore his cultural impact on new genres and technologies. Papers will be selected with these criteria in mind and possible topics may include:
International Conference: 6-8 July 2012
Centre for Studies in Literature, University of Portsmouth
Keynote Speakers: Professor Jay Clayton (Vanderbilt University), Professor Ann Heilmann (University of Hull), Professor Cora Kaplan (Queen Mary, University of London), Professor Lillian Nayder (Bates College) and Professor Gail Turley-Houston (University of New Mexico)
‘The Other Dickens: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Contexts’ is an interdisciplinary conference which will form part of Portsmouth’s bicentenary celebrations of Dickens’s birth in the city on 7 February 1812. We invite scholars working in the fields of literature, film, history, cultural and media studies to consider the other Dickens – those aspects of Dickens (both of his life and work) that remain relatively unexplored, or require re-evaluation. Our objective is to foster interaction between Victorian and contemporary scholars in order to re-examine Dickens in his Victorian context; to assess his continuing importance in contemporary culture, in film and television adaptations, on the internet, and as a character in neo-Victorian fiction; and to explore the rising interest in Dickens’s family members and associated figures (e.g. Ellen Ternan, Catherine Dickens, née Hogarth) in biography and biofiction. Conference participants will be invited to challenge popular perceptions of Victorian Dickens and to explore his cultural impact on new genres and technologies. Papers will be selected with these criteria in mind and possible topics may include:
- Dickens and journalism
- Dickens and performance
- Dickens and the internet
- Dickens and adaptation
- Dickens and biography
- Dickens and biofiction
- Neo-Victorian Dickens
- Dickens as a character in fiction, film and TV
- Postcolonial Dickens
- Dickens’s family in fiction and biography
Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, together with a brief biographical note listing your affiliation, to: theotherdickens@port.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 30 November 2011.
