Special Issue of Dickens Quarterly: "Dickens and His Publics"
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Dickens Quarterly
“Dickens and His Publics”
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. We 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.”
We 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