Dickens and Demolition

Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development

AvJoanna Hofer-Robinson

Inbunden, Engelska, 2018

Del i serien Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture

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Beskrivning

Traces and measures the material impact of Dickens’ fiction in London’s built environmentDickens and Demolition examines how tropes, characters, or extracts from Dickens’ fiction were repurposed as a portable terminology in arguments for large-scale demolition and redevelopment projects in London during his lifetime. Commentators with public voices repeatedly mobilised a Dickensian vocabulary to communicate their opinions about how and where London’s built environment should be improved in the mid-nineteenth century, or to justify proposed alterations. In analysing allusions to Dickens in a variety of archival sources, including dramatizations, press reports, political debates, and the visual arts, this book asks what cultural work is performed by literary afterlives, and whether we can trace their material effects in the spaces we inhabit.Key FeaturesIntersects with cross-disciplinary scholarly interests in studies of Dickens, histories of London, literary afterlives and urban studiesThe first study of how Dickens’s works were appropriated and mobilised by other people within his lifetimeOffers close analyses of literary and non-literary textsEngages with critical discourse around of literary afterlives

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2018-08-02
Mått:156 x 234 x 22 mm
Vikt:550 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture
Antal sidor:264
Förlag:Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:9781474420983

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Mer om författaren

Joanna Hofer-Robinson is an Assistant Professor in the English and Comparative Literary Studies department at the University of Warwick. Her recent publications include Dickens and Demolition (2018) and Sensation Drama, 1860—1880: An Anthology (2019, co-edited with Beth Palmer), as well as articles on various aspects of nineteenth-century drama and Dickens studies.

Recensioner i media

Dickens and Demolition shows how Dickens shaped London. Not only was the novelist actively involved in urban sanitation schemes, but his fictional depiction of London's most deprived areas helped to bring down buildings, and construct new streets. As Hofer-Robinson vividly demonstrates here, novels have afterlives, and literary tropes sometimes have decidedly material effects.

Innehållsförteckning

Abbreviations and a Note on EditionsList of IllustrationsIntroductionChapter OneCharles Dickens and Metropolitan ImprovementsChapter TwoSets and the City: Staging Oliver Twist and LondonChapter ThreeDickensian Afterlives and the Demolition of Field LaneChapter Four Instrumental Writing: Paperwork, Philanthropy, and Dickens’s Involvement in Urban ImprovementsChapter FiveFrom Sanitary Reform to Cultural Memory: The Case of Jacob’s IslandCodaArchival Sources and a Note on MethodSelect BibliographyNotes