Reading Dickens Differently:

Review in Dickens Quarterly 37 (2020), p. 195: "This is a valuable acquisition for scholars wishing to rethink the boundaries of their own research methodologies and focuses. Dickens’s readers will appreciate the indication this collection gives that more precise history of the author and his increasingly interactive corpus are both waiting to be developed and explored in the twenty-first century."

Many challenges have arisen recently to traditional ways of reading texts. Scholars like Todorov, Compagnon, Jouve, Macherey and Picard have posed poignant questions: What is literature for? Why do we study it? What are the gaps to be filled? How is it a form of game-playing? These essays seek to explore how Dickens’s texts may be radically reconceived. Strategies include digital projects; innovative editions; an exploration of anomalies, and incoherencies, and absences; and the provision of more ‘complete’ texts. Such investigations may offer exciting new possibilities for engagement, redefinition, and liberation, to aid in the rescue mission of a seemingly imperilled form.