In a radical reassessment of one of the greatest writers of all time, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State draws on the theories of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, in addition to Julia Kristeva and Edward Said, to situate Dickens within the discourses circulating within his society - in particular those associated with modernity. Focussing on Dickens's novels written after 1848, his relationship to modernity can be seen in his treatment of violence, seen in two forms in his writing: that of the state (in the rationalising powers of Victorian bourgeois modernisation), and physical violence, as portrayed in Dickens's criminals and interest in masochism and corpses.

Drawing on the theories of Foucault, Deleuze, and others, Tambling situates Dickens within the discourses circulating in his society and presents the author as a modernist, forcing repressed areas of Victorian existence (repressed women, colonized subjects, the working class, the criminal "other") into the open to demonstrate power--but then violently recoiling from them in an attitude of disgust. He focuses on Great Expectations, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit, with additional discussion of Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Edwin Drood, and Our Mutual Friend. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book reappraises Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and his imaginative engagement with its principal protagonist.

Dickens's relationship to cities is part of his modernity and his enduring fascination. How he thought about, grasped and conceptualised the rapidly expanding and anonymous urban scene are all fascinating aspects of a critical debate which, starting virtually from Dickens's own time, has become more and more active and questioning of the significance of that new thing, the unknown and unknowable, city. Although Dickens was influenced by several European and American cities, the most significant city for Dickens was London, the city he knew as a boy in the 1820s and which developed in his lifetime to become the finance and imperial capital of the nineteenth-century. His sense of London as monumental and fashionable, modern and anachronistic, has generated a large number of writings and critical approaches: Marxist, sociological, psychoanalytic and deconstructive. Dickens looks at the city from several aspects: as a place bringing together poverty and riches; as the place of the new and of chance and coincidence, and of secret lives exposed by the special figure of the detective. Another crucial area of study is the relationship of the city to women, and women's place in the city, as well as the way Dickens's London matches up with other visual representations. This anthology of criticism surveys the field and is a major contribution to the study of cities, city culture, modernity and Dickens. It brings together key previously published articles and essays and features a comprehensive bibliography of work which scholars can continue to explore.

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.

‘Dickens and America’ has been amply studied, his no less important relationship to Italy much less so, despite his friend Forster's assertion that his long stay in Genoa represented ‘the turning-point of his career.’ This book, arising from a major conference held in Genoa in 2007, attempts to redress the balance, focusing primarily on Dickens's two major writings about Italy—the travel book Pictures from Italy of 1845, and Part Two of his great novel Little Dorrit of 1855–7. It falls into six sections: the first concerns Dickens's enjoyment of leisure for the first time in his life in Italy; the second, his response to the visual attractions of Italy, both natural and artistic; the third, his political stance about Italy in the period of the Risorgimento; the fourth, his preoccupation with death and decay in what he saw and experienced in Italy; the fifth, his representation of ‘Italianness’ in Little Dorrit and elsewhere; and the sixth, his relation to modern and contemporary writers about Italy. It thus aims to fill a vital gap in Dickens studies.

At a time when biblical authority was under challenge from the Higher Criticism and evolutionary science, ‘what providence meant’ was the most keenly contested of questions. This book takes up the controversial subject of Dickens and religion, and offers a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary area of religion and literature. In a close study of major novels, it argues that networks of biblical allusion reveal the Judeo-Christian grand narrative as key to his development as a writer, and as the ontological ground on which he stands to appeal to ‘the conscience of a Christian people’. Engaging the biblical narrative in dialogue with other contemporary narratives that concern themselves with origins, destinations, and hermeneutic decipherments, the inimitable Dickens affirms the Bible’s still-active role in popular culture. The providential thinking of two twentieth-century theorists, Bakhtin and Ricoeur, sheds light on an exploration of Dickens’s narrative theology.