Dickens and Decadence
Edited by Giles Whiteley, Jonathan Foster
- Brings leading Dickensians and leading scholars of Decadence into conversation with one another
- Broadens our understanding of the work and the significance of the pre-eminent Victorian novelist and deepens our understanding of the contours of fin-de-siècle Decadence
- Fills gaps in the critical literature on Dickens’s modernism and his late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reception
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Series Preface
Notes on Contributors
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: From Dickens’s Decadence to a Decadent Dickens
Giles Whiteley and Jonathan Foster
Part I. Dickens on Decadence
1. ‘I almost wonder that YOU never turned your thoughts to Africa’: Decadent Commodity Culture in Bleak House
Grace Moore
2. Skimpole’s Peasant Boy: Dickens, Tolstoy and Decadence
Tom Hubbard
3. Maladministration: Dickens, Decadence and the Higher Civil Service
Jonathan Foster
4. ‘The Spike that Intervenes’: The Corruption of the East by the Decadence of the West in The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Pete Orford
Part II. Dickens’s Decadence
5. The Theatre of Cruelty of Our Mutual Friend
John Bowen
6. ‘But then I mean so much that I – that I don’t mean’: Sincerity and Decadence in Our Mutual Friend
Tamsin Evernden
7. Dickens: Dining Decadently
Claire Wood
8. Anti-Chronology: Decadence in Carlyle, Dickens and Baudelaire
Jeremy Tambling
Part III. Decadent Dickens
9. Huysmans’ Dickensian Ark: Decadence and the Domestic
Giles Whiteley
10. ‘When to Lie and How’: Caricature and the Decadent Legacy of Charles Dickens
Kimberly J. Stern
11. Charles Dickens, Arthur Machen and the Aesthetic Alchemy of Things
Dennis Denisoff
12. Three Masters: Charles Dickens in the Work of Stefan Zweig, Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka
James Dowthwaite
Postscript: Dickens’s Wild Style
Giles Whiteley
Index
Here a high-end collection of scholars addresses the great novelist’s condemnation of the decadence of Victorian Britain, the decadence of his own prose and his appropriation by the Decadent writers of the Fin de Siècle, one of the world’s most stimulating literary periods. Rich food for thought, including examinations of realism, sincerity, cruelty, modernism, magic and even dining.
