Dickens Re-Visioned 3301-LB2050
The aim of the course is to discuss selected works of Charles Dickens through the prism of their cultural legacy and global circulation and to consider how adaptations serve as interpretations and re-representations of the source texts and as their cultural afterlife. The topics discussed in the classroom will explore the following aspects of the scholarship on the author and his oeuvres:
• biographical Dickens
• “The Inimitable Boz” as a public figure
• Dickens, the theatre and theatricality
• Dickens and the Victorian melodrama
• the performative nature of Dickens’s characters
• Dickens and film
• Dickens’s public readings of his own works
• Dickens’s cross-class appeal
• the use of Dickens in education
• Dickens’s global circulation
• Dickens and the heritage industry
• adopting and adapting Dickens
• Dickens’s language
• Dickens and the development of detective and thriller fiction
• Charles Dickens Museum (48 Doughty Street, London) and its role in preserving and popularizing Dickens’s cultural heritage
• Dickens in the internet age: the role of Dickens Journals Online (http://djo.org.uk), The Dickens Project (http://dickens.ucsc.edu), The Charles Dickens Letters Project (http://dickensletters.com) in popularizing and upholding Dickens’s literary and cultural heritage.
• Dickens and the Gothic
• Dickens and Illustration
• Dickens and Victorian popular culture
• Dickens and the uses of history
• Dickens and America
• Dickens and the law
• postcolonial Dickens
Education at language level B2+.
First-cycle studies (Bachelor's degree programme)
Type of course
Course coordinators
Learning outcomes
Having completed the course participants should have acquired:
Knowledge
• thorough knowledge of Dickens’s life and selected works
• understanding of new considerations of his contexts—from social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious—as well as his understanding of British history, of empire and colonisation, of his own nation and otherness
• thorough knowledge of selected film, radio and stage adaptations and revisions of Dickens’s literary works and their influence on popular culture
• understanding of principal concepts of literary and cultural theory
as well as film adaptation theory
• ability to conduct interdisciplinary research deploying heterogenous approaches and methodologies
Skills:
• ability to develop and discuss their own ways of reading and interpreting a wide variety of cultural documents (developing such skills as presentation, communication, critical thinking)
• ability to effectively plan and conduct research survey concerning literary and cultural studies at academic level. Skills derived from preparing research papers are by no means just academic. Many reports and proposals required in business, government, and other professions similarly rely on secondary research. It is difficult to think of any profession that would not require you to consult sources of information about a specific subject, to combine the information with your ideas, and present your thoughts, findings, and conclusions effectively.
• Ability to prepare a workshop or a lesson concerning a selected work of Charles Dickens targeted at a particular audience
In class discussions students acquire skills of expressing their thoughts in a clear, coherent, logical and precise manner, with the use of language which is correct grammatically, lexically and phonetically.
Assessment criteria
- Active participation in classes
- Continuous assessment of assignments
- Two mid-term tests (passing score: 60%)
Allowable absences: 2
A student who fails an exam may write it again during the resit examination session.
Bibliography
Primary sources:
Selected works of Charles Dickens, e.g. Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, Christmas Books and Stories, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Our Mutual Friend, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, etc.,
Secondary sources:
• Patten, Robert L., Jordan, John O., and Catherine Waters, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens. Oxford: OUP, 2018.
• Schlicke, Paul, ed. The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens. Oxford: OUP, 2011.
• Jordan, John O., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. Cambridge, CUP, 2001.
• Paroissien, David, ed. A Companion to Charles Dickens. Blackwell Publishing, 2008.
• John, Juliet. Dickens’s Villains. Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture. Oxford: OUP, 2001.
• Ledger, Sally and Holly Furneaux. Charles Dickens in Context. Cambridge: CUP, 2011.
• Cardwell, Sarah. Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.
• Bolton, H. Philip. Dickens Dramatized. London: Mansell, 1987.
• Davis, Paul. The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
• Andrews, Malcolm. Charles Dickens and his Performing Selves. Oxford: OUP, 2006.
• Leitch, Thomas. The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
• Tambling, Jeremy. Dickens, Violence and the Modern State. Dreams of the Scaffold. Palgrave Macmillan, 1995.
• Tambling, Jeremy. Dickens’ Novels as Poetry: Allegory and the Literature of the City. New York and London, Routledge, 2015.
• Streaky Bacon: A Guide to Victorian Adaptations. http://www.streakybacon.net/
• Burdett, Carolyn and Hilary Fraser, eds. “The Nineteenth-Century Digital Archive.” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
• Marsh, Joss. Starring Charles Dickens: Multi-Media ‘Boz’ and the Culture of Celebrity. New York and London: Routledge, 2019.
• Charles Dickens Museum London
http://dickensmuseum.com/
• Dickens in America TV Series (Miriam Margoyles) David Lane, Contemporary British Drama, 2011.
• Dickens’s Women. Co-written and performed by Miriam Margolyes, BBC Audiobooks, 2012.
• A selection of film and stage adaptations of Dickens’s works
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: