The Dickensian Tropism in Contemporary Fiction

Dickens is a prominent figure in neo-Victorian fiction. Indeed, ‘neo-Dickensian’ features as a sub-category of the neo-Victorian output and largely contributes to the so-called ‘Dickens Afterlife.’ Yet, studies of contemporary fictions overly drawing from Dickens’s works have so far been piecemeal a...

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Main Author: Georges Letissier
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2012-01-01
Series:Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/cve/12419
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author Georges Letissier
author_facet Georges Letissier
author_sort Georges Letissier
collection DOAJ
description Dickens is a prominent figure in neo-Victorian fiction. Indeed, ‘neo-Dickensian’ features as a sub-category of the neo-Victorian output and largely contributes to the so-called ‘Dickens Afterlife.’ Yet, studies of contemporary fictions overly drawing from Dickens’s works have so far been piecemeal as there has not been any attempt to address Dickensian rewritings from a wide, comprehensive perspective. It is our purpose in this paper to try to sketch out a few directions to (hopefully?) initiate an in-depth reflection on Dickens’s reception in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century from a sample of texts revisiting, recycling, ‘reprising’ or deconstructing their Dickensian hypotexts. This article draws from Jay Clayton’s study on Dickens and postmodernism to track down different contemporary responses from Kathy Acker to Sarah Waters and the Antipodean rewritings of both Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip.
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publisher Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
record_format Article
series Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
spelling doaj-art-4446b9cd80c84614ae22512b4adae7942025-01-30T10:21:00ZengPresses Universitaires de la MéditerranéeCahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens0220-56102271-61492012-01-0110.4000/cve.12419The Dickensian Tropism in Contemporary FictionGeorges LetissierDickens is a prominent figure in neo-Victorian fiction. Indeed, ‘neo-Dickensian’ features as a sub-category of the neo-Victorian output and largely contributes to the so-called ‘Dickens Afterlife.’ Yet, studies of contemporary fictions overly drawing from Dickens’s works have so far been piecemeal as there has not been any attempt to address Dickensian rewritings from a wide, comprehensive perspective. It is our purpose in this paper to try to sketch out a few directions to (hopefully?) initiate an in-depth reflection on Dickens’s reception in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century from a sample of texts revisiting, recycling, ‘reprising’ or deconstructing their Dickensian hypotexts. This article draws from Jay Clayton’s study on Dickens and postmodernism to track down different contemporary responses from Kathy Acker to Sarah Waters and the Antipodean rewritings of both Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip.https://journals.openedition.org/cve/12419
spellingShingle Georges Letissier
The Dickensian Tropism in Contemporary Fiction
Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
title The Dickensian Tropism in Contemporary Fiction
title_full The Dickensian Tropism in Contemporary Fiction
title_fullStr The Dickensian Tropism in Contemporary Fiction
title_full_unstemmed The Dickensian Tropism in Contemporary Fiction
title_short The Dickensian Tropism in Contemporary Fiction
title_sort dickensian tropism in contemporary fiction
url https://journals.openedition.org/cve/12419
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