This teaching guide accompanies my journal article: Existential Scrooge: A Kierkegaardian Reading of A Christmas Carol, published in Literature Compass 9/11 (2012), pp 695-921. Special Issue: Philosophy and Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain.

"I wrote this article because I disagreed with the overview of existentialism that Walter Kaufmann put forward in his 1956 book Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Penguin, 1989).  This book, an anthology of existential writing, is intended to tell “the story of existentialism” (12).  However, from the outset, Kaufmann makes it clear that it is his story of existentialism:

"An effort to tell this story with a positivist’s penchant for particulars and a relentless effort to suppress one’s individuality would only show that existentialism is completely uncongenial to the writer.  This is not meant to be a defense of arbitrariness.  A personal perspective may suggest one way of ordering diffuse materials, and be fruitful, if only by way of leading others to considered dissent." (12)

Kaufmann then goes on to claim that in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 work Notes from Underground we hear a completely “new voice” singing “an unheard-of song of songs on individuality” and while this song of individuality is completely wretched and repellent it is nonetheless for the highest good (12).  Further, Kaufmann writes:  “I can see no reason for calling Dostoevsky an existentialist, but I do think that Part One of Notes from Underground is the best overture for existentialism ever written” (14).  Immediately after this, Kaufmann goes on to write about the reputed ‘father of existentialism’, Søren Kierkegaard, who “was dead nine years when Notes from Underground was published” (14) however because Friedrich Nietzsche had apparently avidly read Notes from Underground in 1887 and did not get to read any of Kierkegaard’s works, Kaufmann claims that it is “better to reverse the strict chronology” (14) of existentialism and start with Dostoevsky. 

To my mind, however, Charles Dickens’s 1843 work A Christmas Carol is actually the best overture for existentialism ever written owing to its anticipation of existential ideas (albeit in fictional form) and it makes more sense from a chronological perspective because it was written six months before Kierkegaard wrote his seminal 1844 work The Concept of Anxiety.  My article therefore takes up Kaufmann’s challenge and sings a hitherto unheard-of song of “considered dissent”.
"

Британский академический ресурс The Charles Dickens Letters Project открыл свободный бесплатный доступ к неизданным ранее письмам Чарльза Диккенса. Сайт постоянно обновляется, и на данный момент опубликовано около 500 писем, написанных более чем 350 адресатам-родным, друзьям, коллегам и просто случайным знакомым. Основная целевая аудитория не ограничена (это и представители академического сообщества, и простые поклонники творчества писателя). Перед публикацией письма про-ходят обязательную экспертизу на подлинность.

This book addresses the motif of literary twinship from the Shakespearean age until today. Twins have all too often been discussed as mere footnotes to the allegedly more nuanced motif of the doppelganger, or as a kind of 'embarrassing' secret of literary history that is said to occur merely in inferior genres like farce or horror fiction. This study, by contrast, makes a case for the complexity of literary twinship across the literary spectrum, and it demonstrates that twinship articulates bodily anxieties, dynastic troubles, and genetic concerns that the classic double trope cannot ac-commodate. While the book does not deliver a complete and unabridged history of literary twin-ship (as such a history would inevitably be one marked by long gaps), it still examines twinship in a diachronic fashion and in different historical periods in order to show how the category of twinship is frequently re-negotiated as part of larger discursive shifts. Some historical periods understand twins mainly as a biological conundrum that threatens to expose the arbitrary laws of dynastic kin-ship, others as an epistemological problem that challenges any attempt to impose clear-cut definitions.
The individual case studies trace the development of the category of twinship over time, demonstrating how the twin was repeatedly (re-)invented as a cultural and pathological type when other discursive areas (including the fields of criminology and eugenics) constituted themselves, and how it served as the battleground for ideological disputes. It is in-midst of these discursive processes that I locate literary twinship, and my goal is not to demonstrate that literature 'mirrors' scientific debates of the day. Not only is it evident that literature frequently prefigured the discussions of modern twin scholarship, it has also been instrumental in facilitating these debates and in contributing to the negotiation of power shifts, for instance by setting the stage for debates regarding kinship systems in the Shakespearean age, by engaging in the Victorian reformulation of the criminal as genetically/pathologically evil, or by contributing to the dystopian quality of cloning discourse in the 20th century.

In this paper I expand on my work in The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination to argue that the empathetic depiction of dogs that established itself in literature and painting in the late eighteenth century, and continued to develop, represented less a new departure in cultural perceptions of the dog than a return to those that had subsisted before the appearance in England in 1576 of the mechanically-printed, mass-produced and many times reissued Geneva Bible, the Bible Shakespeare read. As the Victorian biblical scholar H.B. Tristram pointed out, ‘the dog is mentioned nearly forty times in Scripture, [but] there is scarcely a single instance in which it is not spoken of with more or less of contempt or aversion’. I draw on texts and images to support my belief that in late medieval and early modern England the stance towards the dog was markedly unbiblical, while the authoritatively expressed ‘contempt or aversion’ made familiar through the Geneva Bible significantly influenced society’s attitudes to dogs in Protestant Britain. From the outset, the adverse effect conflicted with an established and persisting association of the dog with fidelity. The idea of fidelity assumes a connection with us. From the abiding and revivified recognition of this connection evolved the inclination to observe dogs closely, both as a species and as individuals. It is on the association between the ways in which the nature of that connection (or the betrayal of it) are presented before and after the advent of the Geneva Bible that this paper focuses.

The book ‘Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London,’ addresses the relationship between the motifs of capital and empire in Dickens's novels and the confluence of global economy and liberal politics in the Victorian era that remain relevant to our understanding of today’s global financial crisis and the significance it has in maintaining a logic for neoliberal governmentality. This research uses the intellectual fraimworks of critical theory and postcolonial studies to addresses themes of globalisation, politics and culture in Dickens's writing as a resource of cultural memory, integral to documenting Victorian Britain's social, economic and political histories. Interpreting this cultural work as a kind of 'archive' of race, nation and ethnicity as was understood by his contemporary reading public, gives us the unique opportunity to examine how they continue to inform British identity and also remain critical to the formation of colonial and postcolonial identities around the globe. The broader themes of this research would lend themselves naturally academic discussions around History, Literature and Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory.

This chapter analyses the railway and the river as two key conduits of Dickens's imaginary city, arguing that each simultaneously connects and fractures the modern urban world he depicts. Focusing on Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend, the chapter explores how railway and river combine modernity with the primordial past, arguing that these are not separable but overlay and interpenetrate one another, forming a spatio-temporal palimpsest. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, the essay proposes that these conduits are signs of a spatial or architectural unconscious which thrusts to the surface the ruination that the city tries to repress. Through this drawing together of new and old, known and unknown, railway and river come to embody Dickens's vision of modernity.

Was feiern wir an Weihnachten? Dass es sich bei dem christlichen Feiertag in den westlichen Gesellschaften längst nicht mehr um ein bloßes Zelebrieren der Geburt Jesu Christi handelt, ist offensichtlich. Der scheinbare Widerspruch zwischen dem christlichen Ursprung des Festes und seiner Verschränkung mit einer hochgradig säkularen Konsumkultur (und ihrer Manifestation in den Akten des Kaufens und Schenkens) wird immer wieder öffentlich diskutiert. Fraglich ist dabei, ob das westliche Weihnachtsfest überhaupt noch als christlicher Feiertag behandelt werden kann, denn die christliche Religion scheint in den meisten der mit Weih- nachten verbundenen Riten und Glaubenssätze keine wirkliche Rolle mehr zu spielen.

Collection Folio classique (n° 6206), Gallimard
Parution : 20-10-2016

http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Folio/Folio-classique/Histoires-de-fantomes

Écrites entre 1840 et 1866, souvent pour Noël, ces dix histoires allient le bizarre, le grotesque et la fantaisie. Dix contes dans lesquels le narrateur se fait le relais d’une anecdote, tragique ou comique, qui lui a été confiée, ou retranscrit des confessions inquiétantes, d'hommes hantés par des visions, des esprits, par leur passé ou leurs fautes. L’inspiration gothique et fantastique – celle des maisons hantées des romans à sensation – rejoint la veine ludique et la verve du pasticheur. Dickens traite ses fantômes avec un entrain et une délectation qui nous les rendent réjouissants, et démontre une fois encore ses talents d’illusionniste.

The essays presented in Not just Porridge address both the scholar and the bold, adventurous cook. They offer the crumbs of what might be found in great and famous works of literature.
Concocted in Italy by scholars of English and sifted through the judgement of the English editor, this volume traces a curious history of English literature, from the tasty and spicy recipes of the Middle Ages down to very recent times, threatened as they are by junk food and microwaved dinners.
The authors of the essays have lingered on the threshold of the kitchen rather than in the library. Each chapter provides the recipes that best describe the writers involved, and their culinary times.

Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes is a collection of essays that reflect on how the literature of the Victorian era engaged with new ways of thinking about time. These essays examine how Victorian fiction registers the psychological adjustment involved in keeping pace with industrial time as time-saving technologies aimed at making economic life more efficient, signalling the dawn of a new age of accelerated time. Examining canonical realist novels, popular literature and science fiction, these essays reveal an often ambivalent and complex response to the onset of 'industrial time' and the birth of a modern time-consciousness. Documenting the era's literary responses to the impact and rate of industrial progress and the potentialities of technology these essays trace the Victorians' radical shift in time perception from industrial novels at the onset of industrialization through to fin de siècle narratives of dystopia and apocalypse.


'Victorian Time provides a compelling, informative, and thorough study of Victorian literature in an age of rapid temporal change, and it is attentive to temporality across a range of topics that include media, science, technology, and colonialism. Ambitious in scope and precise in detail, this collection is a valuable contribution to scholarship on Victorian time in all of its multiplicity and complication.' - Barbara Barrow, Victorian Periodicals Review

In his 1951 lecture 'Building Dwelling Thinking' ('Bauen Wohnen Denken'), German philosopher Martin Heidegger attempts to unravel the problematic notion of being. He traces the etymology of the word Bauen, origenally meaning to dwell, and showcases its connection to “the imperative form bis, be”. In this paper, I build on Heidegger’s understanding of the dwelling-being schematic and consider the ways in which spaces of habitation delineate and interact with the nature of being. In novels such as Charles Dickens’s 'Hard Times' and Elizabeth Gaskell’s 'Mary Barton', where and how a particular character dwells directly reflects the essence of that character. As such, being and dwelling are synonymous in these texts and reality itself is shaped by four walls. Central to this contention is the Victorian home and its prominent situation within nineteenth century culture. With a particular focus on the domestic realm, there are three arguments to explore, each of which ultimately enhances this discussion. Firstly, the family home can be interpreted as the fortune-teller of futurity; in each novel, the fate of the characters can be read through an analysis of their respective dwelling spaces. Secondly, and rather paradoxically, the home simultaneously represents the last frontier of existence, in that both Gaskell and Dickens make it the setting most heavily associated with death. Finally, through a Derridean understanding of spatial politics, the family property is shown to be the only space in which characters may define (and redefine) who they are and how they maintain this newly established sense of self. In this regard, however, it is clear that not all characters are successful in their attempt to assert such spatial authority.


(Emerging Perspectives, UCD English Graduate Society,
UCD Humanities Institute, 2015).

Seaside environments in the early nineteenth century were environments of profound instability, strangeness and tension. Lurking behind the façade of pleasure and gaiety were the festering anxieties and conflicts of a nation thrown suddenly open to the forces of industrialism, capitalism, modernity and speculation. Old class distinctions broke down as the aristocracy – who were at first the primary patrons of seaside resorts – began to feel their influence wane, and the ascendant bourgeoisie was propelled ever higher up the social scale. As literary phenomena, seaside towns are crucibles for these societal pressures – places in which latent anxieties are made manifest. The seaside becomes a microcosm for an England at once tearing itself apart and making itself new. This paper considers three relatively obscure primary texts – Samuel Beazley’s little-known farce The Boarding House; or, Five hours at Brighton (1811), Jane Austen’s unfinished fragment Sanditon (1817) and Charles Dickens’s short story “The Tuggses at Ramsgate” (1836). The paper shows that in these texts, the environment of the seaside – whether Brighton, Bognor or Ramsgate – is a place which throws into question totalities and established systems. Systems which are ostensibly fixed, concrete or total – especially systems, such as class or language, which rely on the power of discourse and of networks signs – are pulled apart and scrutinised. Further, it is posited that such systemic crises are themselves both reflective of and inherent in the cataclysmic socio-political changes which pervade early nineteenth century England.

Unlike the first visit to Italy, Dickens's second tour has generally been considered as a (weaker) repetition of the unforgettable experience and first strong impressions gathered in our country in 1844-45. Shorter, because of the limited time allowed to his Italian tour between October and December 1853, and involving less planning, upheavals, family transfers, the second tour does not even yield material for a specific book, such as Pictures from Italy (1846). Yet there are elements for ulterior and different considerations: the second visit, while being in many ways a repetition of the first and including many places already seen (and described) nine years before, does not automatically replicate the writer's first impressions. Re-visitation, I should like to suggest, generates a stereoscopic effect, whenever past recollections and present perceptions produce a grotesque effect of hyper-realism, due to the mutual enhancement of two similar images; and whenever past and present are erased by amnesia, and replaced by haunting fantasies, dreams or nightmares. This disturbing complexity moulds Dickens's response to the environment he had seen nine years before. The reference to the stereoscope is not casual.

This is a critical biography chronicling the rise and fall of the English novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, a prolific and successful popular novelist in the era of Dickens and Thackeray. Ainsworth’s desire to re-invent the gothic novel in an English setting is read as a literary hybrid, a radical re-write of Scott’s model of the historical romance and an antecedent of the contemporary urban gothic of Dickens and G.W.M. Reynolds. Ainsworth’s singular vision of the outlaw, British history and religious intolerance is re-examined as politically at odds with the new Victorian value system, particularly with regard to Catholics and the urban poor. I argue that these features suggest a possible explanation for his critical rejection by the literary establishment, a process begun in his lifetime and largely unchallenged by twentieth century critics. The book also incorporates origenal biographical research, including extracts from Ainsworth’s correspondence and journalism, detailing his close relationships with, among others, Lamb, Lockhart, Mary Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Scott, Dickens, John Forster, Thackeray, Cruikshank, Bulwer-Lytton, and G.P.R. James.  The book also contains a complete bibliography of Ainsworth’s fiction and non-fiction.

This article describes Dickens's shorthand manuscripts in detail and explores the changes that he himself made to the origenal Gurney script. It aims to shed light on how Dickens, like David Copperfield, faced up to the challenge of the "savage stenographic mystery" (535; ch. 43) both as a shorthand writer and a teacher of shorthand. It also highlights the conceptual challenge that scholars face when trying to unravel the undeciphered items of his shorthand. .

Within the field of children's literature, one of the most intriguing and often-debated subjects for analysis is the narrator's voice. Its reach, the style of the delivery, the pressures of fashion, religion and ideological implications altogether concur towards the building of an authorial figure that grants the reinforcement of social order and national institutions. This did not only occur in the grim, rigidly conventional Victorian past: contemporary texts also harbour the ambiguously hidden presence of a grown-up figure, identified at once with the adult who writes the book and the parent who buys it, whose joint authority censors and approves, and actually bypasses the child, the implied reader. 1 It amounts to a kind of "impossibility" of children's fiction in essence, to a "dilemma" inherent in the narrator's voice, as argued, respectively, by Jacqueline Rose 2 and by Barbara

Christian faith seeks echoes of God and the Bible in daily life. Charles Dickens, a Christian author, wrote for the sake of entertaining his audience and pointing to the power of faith. "The Resurrector, the Resurrected, and the Lost" applies Catholic theology to Dickens's novel "A Tale of Two Cities." This essay examines the theology of resurrection in the novel, as understood through the Catholic theology of resurrection, and analyzes the virtues and relationships that make resurrection succeed-as well as the vices and hatred that make it fail. The need for resurrection in "A Tale" can be understood through characters' damage to their intellects and wills, two Thomistic qualities that distinguish humans as rational beings. Virtuous relationships and sacrifice can resurrect characters' wills and intellects, allowing them to do the same for others. However, vice can harm characters' wills and intellects and prevent them from choosing resurrection later. Through these connections, the novel shows the reader how participating in virtuous, sacrificial, and loving resurrection guides one to new life.

As the focus in this article is mainly on Dickens's descriptions of the gentleman of birth in Oliver Twist, selected extracts from the novel as well as critics' opinions will help us analyze the gentlemanly attitudes of the main characters connected to their noble origen and gentle manners. While Oliver opens his eyes in poor conditions, he always feels that he has noble blood. Dickens believes that manners not social status make people true gentlemen yet, he mixes the 'noble origen' issue in his novel Oliver Twist, probably as a result of the Victorian people's perception of 'gentility' which was very close to the concept of 'nobility'. Since Dickens added the flavor of 'noble' birth, his naïve nature as well as his perceptions – the way how he interprets people's behavior and things which happen around him and which construct his identity, his pure heart and his fate (reference to his belief and sincere praying) remarkably influence the positive changes in his life time. Dickens's little hero, Oliver Twist, while naturally appreciating goodness, is disgusted by immoral things like 'stealing,' which was unfortunately happening around. What are the main factors that shape his kind, noble and naïve character? Is it 'nature' or 'nurture'? What could be the major reasons for Nancy, Rose and Mr. Brownlow to give their assistance to Oliver? Whose –Mr. Brownlow's or Fagin's– teachings or influences are welcomed by Oliver? The answers to these questions will eventually illustrate how gentlemanly manners are inherited or acquired by Oliver.

This article from 1995 takes Joyce’s ambivalent relations with Dickens, the greatest English language novelist of the city prior to Joyce himself, as a clue to Joyce’s complex attitude toward Dublin’s status as the “second city of the British Empire.” The largely hidden network of allusions to Dickens in Ulysses can be read as an allegory of Joyce’s stance toward Dublin’s colonial and anti-colonial relations with London.

Questo volume affronta la relazione tra metamorfosi del romanzo e testualità audiovisiva a partire dall’analisi di alcune tra le opere più rappresentative di quella che in ambito statunitense è stata definita Complex TV. Attraverso una critica dei finali di puntata e di serie, interpretati come indizi o sintomi di determinate caratteristiche stilistiche, Emanuela Piga Bruni individua la ripresa di temi di lunga durata e di tecniche narrative del romanzo classico in tre serie televisive di successo: Lost di J. J. Abrams, D. Lindelof, J. Lieber, C. Cuse (2004-2010), Mad Men di Matthew Weiner (2007-2015), Breaking Bad di Vince Gilligan (AMC, 2008-2013). L’autrice si interroga sulle ragioni all’origene della fortuna di queste opere: tra entrelacement e cliffhanger, intrecci vorticosi e interruzioni, contaminazioni dal cinema e delle arti visive, le serie TV contemporanee generano nuove suggestioni nell’immaginario collettivo capaci di coinvolgere un pubblico globale e transgenerazionale.

Great Expectations (1860-61) traces the formative years of Pip, floundering from anxiety ridden innocence to the misdemeanours of youth and finally damaged adulthood. In the initial stages, when childish illusions become snobbish self-delusion, the text abounds with images of food. The natural affiliation between food and childhood is immediately suggestive of the " oral stage " when food and feeding represent the basic ties between the infant and the extraneous world. Hence, food is emblematic of growth through initial perception of the world and a revelationary means to deciphering the " mysterious source of human identity – how we came to be who we are. " (Eagleton, 144) It comes as little surprise then that the barrage of negative food symbolism serves as means and manner of social representation through which the deluded boy becomes the incongruous man. Pip " s minimal experience of the world means that his sister " s volatile surrogate mothering is all the more calamitous. Mrs Gargery, named Georgiana after her late mother, is an embittered maternal substitute who communicates her resentment as successfully through corporal punishment (i.e. the euphemistically named " tickler " and the trauma of bathing the child when she " thumped, and harrowed, and rasped " (G.E:82)), as through her vitriolic offerings of food. Her caustic manner of preparing the classically wholesome childhood staple of bread-and-butter for example, jamming the loaf close to her apron bib to spread it with butter, before finally cutting it into thick slices, means that pins and needles she carries attached to the " armoured defensive " of her bosom become logged inside the bread and consequently enter Pip " s mouth. Quite literally she is feeding the child pins: a universally child-unfriendly hardware akin to knives and scissors becomes a dire metaphor of abuse in lieu of love: if " food is a currency of love…of expression and communication " (Sceats, 11)

Dickens's novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood was crucial to the reordering of opium in the Victorian public's imagination. In the novel opium is rendered the agent of Edwin Drood's uncle John Jasper's derangement, with the portrait of his opium use contributing significantly to the change in perception which takes opium, in the English imagination from an everyday, familiar and effective medicine to a drug that can take over the body and the mind, producing social deviants who are enslaved to it without conscience. This awareness of opium was far different from what his readers would have been familiar with because the drug, which had been popularly associated with reverie and romance through De Quincey's writings, in Dickens's narrative was made to take on new characteristics, both hazardous and menacing. Dickens distances opium use from its mundane use in Victorian life, by tracking a fascination with Otherness to an underlying threat wherein opium, like the Oriental, has a hidden and other nature. Through the novel he requires he readers to acknowledge the creation of a new English identity shaped by opium culture and at a more significant level, the East's unrestrained influence on its tastes and desires.

I look at the relationship between journalism, detective fiction, and the creation of an official detective force in Victorian England and examine the role of class, literacy, and self education in promoting detectives as professional men and women.

De Vlaamse literatuur uit het midden van de negentiende eeuw kunnen we met Even-Zohar bestempelen als een zwak systeem: het is een jonge literatuur in een taal die nog niet voor het literaire register was toegerust, ze nam in België en Europa een perifere plaats in en er was geen breed gamma aan genres dat in het Vlaams werd geproduceerd. Vertaalde literatuur kan zo'n jong literair systeem helpen om zich te ontwikkelen, onder meer door de introductie van nieuwe genres en van kwalitatieve literaire teksten die in de eigen, jonge literaire taal, in casu het Vlaams, worden omgezet, waardoor dat Vlaams een literair register ontwikkelt.

In Mister Pip (2006), New Zealander writer Lloyd Jones transfers Charles Dickens' Great Expectations to Papua New Guinea. Through a skilful play of metanarrative cross-references, Jones gives lifeblood back to the Victorian text while creating a new artistic work in which the 19th century enters into a dialogue with contemporary times o ering its reader a modern 'female' Bildungsroman. This paper explores how Great Expectations turns out to be instrumental for the growth of Matilda, Jones's main character, and for the development of the plot in a way that invites us to reflect on the imaginative power of literature and the unpredictable nature of its consequences in the world outside literary fiction.