“Dickens and His Publics”
Special Issue of Dickens Quarterly
Projected for March 2024
This Special Issue of Dickens Quarterly, projected for March 2024, opens the pages of the journal to all of Dickens’s publics—that is, to the many different kinds of readers and writers who engage meaningfully with Charles Dickens.
The editors are especially interested in personal, reflective readings and analyses of Dickens. They seek excellent writing that offers new and invigorating ways of doing criticism, including subjective forms of criticism or critical/creative hybrids, and essays that bring Dickens into relevance with our own time. This Special Issue hopes to open emancipatory spaces within the field of Dickens studies and in literary studies generally. The editors are hospitable to essays which challenge conventional scholarly expectations, in the project of locating what Ross Posnock has called “a more spiritual, less cognitive and linguistic approach to art.”
They welcome contributions from all readers of Dickens: Victorianists, Dickens experts, non-specialists, early- and late-career academics, creative writers, students at every level of literary study, and so-called “lay” readers.
Please send inquiries and finished essays (3,000-5,000 words) to Michelle Allen-Emerson meallen@usna.edu and Annette Federico federiar@jmu.edu by September 1, 2023.
Possible topics:
- Reading Dickens over time
- Reading Dickens with others
- Teaching Dickens
- Transformative Dickens
- Laughing with Dickens
- Dickens and family
- Dickens and love
- Dickens and race
- Dickens and identity
- Political Dickens
- Coming-of-age with Dickens
- Philosophical Dickens
- Dickens and mindfulness
- Dickens as spiritual practice
- Dickens for mental health
- Morality in Dickens
- The joy of Dickens
- Struggling with Dickens
- Growing up with Dickens
- Growing old with Dickens
- Dickens and loss
- Practical Dickens
- Dickensian things
- Dickensian favorites