Charles Dickens, modernism, modernity

CHARLES DICKENS, MODERNISM, MODERNITYCOLLOQUE DE CERISYEdition sous la direction de Christine Huguet et Nathalie VanfasseCharles Dickens, Modernism, Modernity examines the reasons why Dickens’s fiction, this “flowing and mixed substance called Dickens,” as Chesterton once said, became straightaway – and forever, it would seem – a world landmark.Seeking to uncover some of the secret springs of the great novelist’s timeless, mythical fiction, the essays collected in these volumes mirror the current variety of theoretical approaches to the intriguing question of Dickens’s receptiveness to the modern. They began life as presentations given at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-la-Salle, France’s premier site for conferences on Arts and Humanities. The greatest writers and thinkers have been honoured there for over a century: it is precisely on account of its tradition of engagement with the avant-garde and the to-dayish that Cerisy was felt to be the ideal venue, in the run-up to the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth, for a debate over where to locate the temporal and aesthetic standards delineating the great Victorian writer’s modernity, and over how much these standards reveal about our own values and sense of the up-to-date.Providing an attractive snapshot of recent Dickens scholarship, these two Colloque de Cerisy volumes contribute to invigorate the very active international and interdisciplinary field of Dickens studies.Volume 1: Urban Modernity; Modernity in / and MotionVolume 1 examines how Dickens’s representation of life’s epic as rooted in contemporary reality gives him access to the poetical within the historical, the eternal within the transitory. Contributions by Andrew Ballantyne, Michael Hollington, Christine Huguet, Juliet John, Francesca Orestano, Wendy Parkins, Robert L. Patten, Gillian Piggott, Vladimir Trendafilov, Nathalie Vanfasse.