Overview

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

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9780198743415

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offers a gold-standard survey, with sections on life and career, major works, context and worldview, and many more. * Pamela K. Gilbert, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 * This will be a valuable resource for all Dickens readers, and it will complement any reading of Dickens's prose. * S.A. Parker, CHOICE *

offers a gold-standard survey, with sections on life and career, major works, context and worldview, and many more. * Pamela K. Gilbert, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 * a comprehensive and wide-ranging set of essays on the present state of Dickens studies, including further reading suggestions at the end of each chapter, as well as frequent reflections on the directions future work in the field might profitably take ... This is a valuable reference work: impressive in its scope, thoughtfully organised, and with illuminating insights on Dickens dotted throughout. * Benjamin Westwood, Nineteenth-Century Contexts * Altogether, the editors are to be congratulated in eliciting and compiling so much excellent work...students and postgraduates will find it invaluable. It is a full and trustworthy volume, exemplary in its scholarship and offering a clear exposition of the current healthy state of play of Dickens studies in the academic world. * Jenny Hartley, The Dickensian * This will be a valuable resource for all Dickens readers, and it will complement any reading of Dickens's prose. * S.A. Parker, CHOICE *

This will be a valuable resource for all Dickens readers, and it will complement any reading of Dickens's prose. * S.A. Parker, CHOICE *

Author Information

Robert L. Patten writes primarily about Victorian literature, graphic arts, and print culture. He has co-edited volumes of essays on Dickens with John O. Jordan (Literature in the Marketplace, Cambridge, 1995) and John Bowen (Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, Palgrave, 2006). His books on Dickens include Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford, 1978; 2nd edn. enlarged, 2017) and the Colby prize winning Charles Dickens and ""Boz"": The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author, Cambridge, 2012). His two-volume biography, George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art (Rutgers, 1992, 1996) was named the best biography of the 1990s by the Guardian. And for the Ashgate Library of Essays on Charles Dickens, a 6-volume series edited by Catherine Waters, he edited the volume on Dickens and Victorian Print Culture (2012). John O. Jordan is Research Professor of Literature and Director of the Dickens Project at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Supposing Bleak House (U if Virginia Press, 2011). He edited The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens (2001) and has co-edited several essay collections on Victorian Literature and on Dickens, most recently Global Dickens (Ashgate 2012). Catherine Waters is Professor of Victorian Literature and Print Culture at the University of Kent. She is the author of Dickens and the Politics of the Family (Cambridge UP 1997) and Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (Ashgate 2008). She is series editor of the 6-volume collection, A Library of Essays on Charles Dickens (Ashgate 2012) and has co-edited several essay collections devoted to Dickens, the most recent being Dickens and the Imagined Child, co-edited with Peter Merchant (Ashgate 2015). She is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Dickens Journals Online project and a vice-president of the Canterbury branch of the Dickens Fellowship.

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