Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds

The essays collected in this volume offer fresh readings of Dickens’s travelogues and novels, often pointing to the many-sidedness of his personality. The ’uncommercial traveller’ emerges as an ecumenical John Bull, chary of the alien but greedy of novelty, a man whose incursions on well-trodden or unfamiliar ground are always journeys into the uncanny. Besides dealing with the geography of the novelist’s imagination, the book explores numerous ’new worlds’ such as the inspiring world of Victorian science and Dickens’s responses to it or the world of modern literary theory that shapes our own responses to his work.

MALCOLM ANDREWS Professor of Victorian and Visual Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury MATTHIAS BAUER Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster JAMES BUZARD Associate Professor of Literature and holds the class of 1956 Career Development Chair, MIT BRIAN CHEADLE Professor of English, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg K. J. FIELDING University of Edinburgh Emeritus Professor NEIL FORSYTH Professor of English, University of Oklahoma JENNIFER GRIBBLE Associate Professor of English, University of Sydney JOHN C. HAWLEY Associate Professor of English, Santa Clara University MICHAEL HOLLINGTON Professor of English, University of Toulon JOHN O. JORDAN Professor of English, Santa Cruz campus, University of California PATRICK J. MCCARTHY Emeritus Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara NANCY METZ Associate Professor of English, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University SYLVERE MONOD retired Professor of English PATRICIA PLUMMER Lecturer in English, Mainz University ROBERT POLHEMUS Professor of English, Stanford University DOMINIC RAINSFORD Lecturer in English, University of Wales, Aberystwyth TORE REM Junior Research Fellow in English Literature, Christ Church, University of Oxford VICTOR SAGE Reader in English Literature, School of English and American Studies, University of East Anglia PAUL SCHLICKE Senior Lecturer, University of Aberdeen ROGER SELL J.O.E. Donner Professor of English Language and Literature, Abo Akademi University RONALD H. THOMAS Associate Professor and Chairman, English Department, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut SARA THORNTON ’Maître de Conférences’, University of Picardy, France.