Registration Open: Dickens Day 2012, ‘Dickens and Popular Culture’
Dickens Day
Saturday 13th October 2012
Dickens and Popular Culture
Senate House (South), University of London,
Beveridge Hall and G22/26
Keynote Speaker: Professor Juliet John
Dickens Day, now in its 26th year, is celebrating 2012 with a theme that explores Dickens’s popularity and his engagement with non-elite cultures from his own time to the present. On the evidence of bicentenary Dickens fervour, the author is as popular now as he has ever been. This year has been punctuated by Dickens serials on TV, heartfelt tributes from popular writers, mass-selling biography, collective reading projects, Dickens hip-hop performances, and a global read-a-thon. How can we account for this continuing engagement, across different genres and various cultural contexts? What is it that gives Dickens’s work its particular appeal? What are the political and personal investments in forms of Dickensian popularity? How does this relate to Dickens’s own aspirations, and to the forms in which his work first appeared? These are some of the questions that the day seeks to address.
There will be papers, readings and a panel dedicated to research inspired by the work of the late Sally Ledger, whose book Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination is an important foundation for this event.
Tickets are:
£20 STANDARD
£15 IES MEMBERS/RETIRED/UNWAGED
£10 STUDENTS
To book, and for further information, visit:
http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/events/ies-conferences/DickensDay12
All enquiries to: Jon Millington, Events Officer, Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel +44 (0) 207 664 4859; Email: IESEvents@sas.ac.uk.
‘The Other Dickens: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Contexts’
‘The Other Dickens: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Contexts’
Registration for ‘The Other Dickens: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Contexts’ conference at the University of Portsmouth, 6-8 July, is now open. You can register and view the draft conference programme online at http://www.port.ac.uk/research/csl/literatureevents/conferences/otherdickens
As well as the conference itself, you are invited to register for two special events: a public lecture by Lillian Nayder entitled ‘Afterlives: Mrs Dickens in Fact and Fiction’ (7pm, 6th July) and Miriam Margolyes’ show ‘Dickens’ Women’ (5pm, 8th July, Portsmouth Grammar School). Further details can be found at http://www.port.ac.uk/special/dickens2012/specialevents
New Issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
New issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Now avaialble at: http://19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/issue/view/82/showToc
Launch event: Wednesday 16 May, 6 pm (for 7.30 reception), Room 101, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London WC1. For booking details, see below.
This issue, guest edited by Bethan Carney and Catherine Waters, re-examines the notorious Trollopian critique of Charles Dickens as ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’, investigating both the complex affective power of his writing and the strong and divided emotional responses it has elicited. As well as essays exploring fiction, journalism, letters, memoirs, portraits, and a range of other forms of material culture, it includes a Forum on ‘Bicentennial Sentiment: Dickens and Feeling Now’. The contributions to this issue invite us to reconsider how we feel about Dickens and about Dickensian feeling 200 years after his birth.
19: INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY
NO 14 (2012): DICKENS AND FEELING
Bethan Carney: ‘Introduction: “Mr Popular Sentiment”: Dickens and Feeling’
Catherine Waters: ‘Materializing Mourning: Dickens, Funerals, and Epitaphs’
Gail Marshall: ‘Popular Sentiments and Public Executions’
Wendy Parkins: ‘“Wot larx!”: William Morris, Charles Dickens, and Fatherly Feelings’
Valerie Sanders: ‘“Joyful convulsions”: Dickens’s Comings and Goings’
Daniel Tyler: ‘Feeling for the Future: The Crisis of Anticipation in Great Expectations’
Jonathan Buckmaster: ‘“A man of great feeling and sensibility”: The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and the Tears of a Clown’
Catherine Malcolmson: ‘“A veritable Dickens shrine”: Commemorating Charles Dickens at the Dickens House Museum’
Forum: ‘Bicentennial Sentiment: Dickens and Feeling Now’ (Contributors: John Drew, Holly Furneaux, Ian Higgins, Juliet John, John O. Jordan, Catherine Malcolmson, Gail Marshall, Kris Siefken, Tony Williams, and Ben Winyard)
Launch event: To mark the publication of ‘Dickens and Feeling’, we will be holding a small launch event at Birkbeck on the evening of Wednesday 16 May, following Holly Furneaux’s Arts Week lecture, ‘Dickens’s Gentle Soldiers: Fiction and Journalism of the Crimean War’. Wednesday 16 May, 6 pm (for 7.30 reception), Room 101, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London WC1. The lecture is free, but registration required at <http://gentlesoldiers.eventbrite.com>
Further details about Birkbeck’s fifth annual Arts Week can be found at <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/arts/about-us/our-events/arts-week-2012>
Call for Articles and Contributions
Call for Articles and Contributions
Victorians Journal of Culture and Literature marks the bicentenary birth-years of Robert Browning and Charles Dickens. New work addressing any aspect of their writing, careers, and contributions to literary and cultural history are invited for consideration. Please send electronic submissions to
deborah.logan@wku.edu<mailto:deborah.logan@wku.edu>
Deadline for submissions: June 30, 2012. Notification: August 2012. Publication: December 2012.
Questions are welcome, as are illustrations (b/w, no copyright issues).
English: The Journal of the English Association Special Issue on Dickens
English: The Journal of the English Association Special Issue on Dickens
*All articles are freely available online until 30 May 2012*
Table of contents available at: http://english.oxfordjournals.org/content/61/232.toc
DICKENS AND BEN JONSON
Jeremy Tambling
DICKENS, ILLITERACY, AND ‘WRITIN’ LARGE’
Gavin Edwards
‘A FRESH LOOK FOR OLD PUPPETS’: MARCUS STONE, CHARLES DICKENS, AND AUTHORSHIP
Jasper Schelstraete
SINGING CHRISTMAS CAROLS: THE DICKENSIAN MUSICAL VS. THE DICKENSIAN MEGA-MUSICAL
Marc Philip Napolitano
ROMANTICISM AT THE DEN
David Parker
*About the journal*
English is an internationally known journal of literary criticism, published on behalf of The English Association. Each issue contains essays on a wide range of authors and literary texts in English, aimed at readers within universities and colleges and presented in a lively and engaging style. There is a substantial review section, in which reviewers have space to situate a book within the context of recent developments in its field, and present a detailed argument. English is unusual among academic journals in publishing original poetry. This policy embodies the view that the critical and creative functions, often so widely separated in the teaching of English, can co-exist and cross-fertilise each other.
Dickens Day 2012: Dickens and Popular Culture
Dickens Day 2012: Dickens and Popular Culture
Saturday 13th October 2012, Senate House, London
Keynote speaker: Professor Juliet John
Dickens Day, now in its 26th year, is celebrating 2012 with a theme that explores Dickens’s popularity and his engagement with non-elite cultures from his own time to the present. On the evidence of bicentenary Dickens fervour, the author is as popular now as he has ever been. This year has been punctuated by Dickens serials on TV, heartfelt tributes from popular writers, mass-selling biography, collective reading projects, Dickens hip-hop performances, and a global read-a-thon. How can we account for this continuing engagement, across different genres and various cultural contexts? What is it that allows Dickens’s work its particular “portability” (to use Juliet John’s term)? And what are the political and personal investments in forms of Dickensian popularity? How does this relate to Dickens’s own aspirations, and to the forms in which his work first appeared? These are some of the questions that the day seeks to address.
Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers from Dickensians of all backgrounds and career stages. There will be a panel featuring research inspired by that of the late Sally Ledger, whose book Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination is an important foundation for our thinking about this event. Please indicate on your proposal if you would like to be considered for this panel.
The plan (in line with the momentous scale of this year) is to consider Dickens’s role in popular culture from his own age to ours. The day will be divided in two, with morning sessions looking at Dickens ‘Then’ (i.e. – the nineteenth century) and the afternoon at ‘Now’.
Topics might include, but are by no means limited to, the following:
· Popular entertainment and culture, fairs, circuses, street performers, Astley’s, ‘The Amusements of the People’, Hard Times;
· Theatre, film, television, adaptations in all media;
· Neo-Dickensiana, re-tellings and re-imaginings, Drood completions;
· Public Readings (by Dickens and others), Penny reading groups;
· The Press, journalism, editing, reporting;
· Charitable activities, Urania Cottage, Hospital for Sick Children, Working Men’s Institutes;
· Christmas;
· Schools and education;
· Literary festivals, Dickens tourism, museums, homes, walking tours, the ‘Dickens World’ theme park;
· Global impact, the reception of Dickens abroad, Dickens in non-Western and colonial and postcolonial cultures and contexts;
· Celebratory exhibitions and events;
· Advertising; technological developments;
· Rap, hip-hop, dance, performance art: non-literary mediations of Dickens’s work
· Bicentennial representations and interpretations of Dickens, his life and his work
Please send proposals (maximum 500 words) to Bethan Carney, Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard at jcarn02@mail.bbk.ac.uk, hf35@le.ac.uk and benwinyard@hotmail.com.
The deadline for paper proposals is 31 May 2012.
Mixed Methods Approaches to Dickens and Characterization Symposium
Mixed Methods Approaches to Dickens and Characterization
May 10th 2012 – University of Nottingham
A symposium at the interface of language and literature
This symposium will illustrate innovative approaches to both Dickens Studies and studies of characterization more generally. Scholars from both language and literature will present cutting-edge research that suggests a mixed methods approach to the study of characterization in literary texts and specifically the novels by Charles Dickens. The talks will address the concept of character in the framework of cognitive poetics, Dickens’s characters in the context of popular culture, corpus methods and the tool CLiC for literary texts, psycholinguistic methods to investigate the reading process and the psychological reality of characters, Dickens and book history, and the reading experience in the 19th century.
Confirmed speakers
Professor Juliet John, Professor in Victorian Literature, Royal Holloway University of London
Professor Peter Stockwell, Professor of Literary Linguistics, University of Nottingham
Professor Josephine Guy, Professor of Modern English Literature, University of Nottingham
Dr. Kathy Conklin, Lecturer in Psycholinguistics, University of Nottingham
Dr. Michaela Mahlberg, Associate Professor in English Language and Applied Linguistics, University of Nottingham
Dr. Catherine Smith, Technical Officer, Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, University of Birmingham
Dr. Simon Preston, RCUK Research Fellow, School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham
Introduction to the Symposium by
Professor Brean Hammond, Professor of Modern English Literature, University of Nottingham
Registration fee:
· £20 (this covers lunch and coffee breaks)
· £10 (for students)
To register, please download a registration form from the Symposium webpage: REGISTRATION DEADLINE 20 APRIL 2012
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cral/events/dickens-symposium.aspx
Programme for Online Dickens Conference March 7th – 8th 2012
Programme for Online Dickens Conference March 7th – 8th 2012
The following papers will be featured at the upcoming online conference Dickens’ World. These will be freely available and open for discussion:
‘Dickens on the Chinese Screen’, Ting Guo
‘Global Dickens’, John O. Jordan
‘The Manly Mind? Revisiting the Victorian ‘Sex in Brain’ Debate’, Rob Boddice
‘Testing a Civilisation: Charles Dickens on the American Penitentiary system’, David Wilson
‘Victorian Print Culture, Journalism and the Novel’, Matthew Rubery
An additional 20 articles will be available for free, including:
‘Dickens and Women’, Kathryn Sutherland
‘In Such a State of Ink: Adolescents in the Novels of Charles Dickens’, Elizabeth Welburn
‘Using Dickens to Market Morality: Popular Reading Materials in the Nickleby “Advertiser”‘, John J. Fenstermaker
Video addresses will be presented by:
David Paroissien: Looking Back and Looking Forward: Shifting Perspectives in Dickens’s Fiction
John Bowen: Beginning the World
Anne Stiles: To be Confirmed
Register for free now at http://dickensworld.wordpress.com/
The event provides an opportunity for an international group of scholars to discuss the work of one of the world’s most important authors. The emphasis is on illustrating the many ways in which Dickens influenced, and was influenced by, his contact with other countries. More broadly, we hope the conference will encourage online discussion about the social, cultural and technological milieu in which (and of which) Dickens wrote.
Free Online Dickens Conference
Free Online Dickens Conference
On the 7th and 8th of March 2012, Wiley-Blackwell will be hosting a free online conference to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens.
Features include:
•Video addresses by prominent Dickens scholars
•Free scholarly papers with discussion forum for each
•Reading Room with free articles and book chapters from Wiley-Blackwell
The event provides an opportunity for an international group of scholars to discuss the work of one of the world’s most important authors. The emphasis is on illustrating the many ways in which Dickens influenced, and was influenced by, his contact with other countries. More broadly, we hope the conference will encourage online discussion about the social, cultural and technological milieu in which (and of which) Dickens wrote. Log on to the discussion whenever it suits your schedule, everyone is welcome to participate!
Find out more at http://dickensworld.wordpress.com/
