e are pleased to announce the call for papers for this year's Dickens Day on the topic of 'Dickens and Time,' considering temporality, timeliness, and timelessness in Dickens's works. The world in which Dickens lived was increasingly defined by schedules and timekeeping - the development of the railway, the conflict between working days and leisure hours. Dickens's works regularly refer to clocks, time, past, present and future. Dickens himself embraced a punishing work schedule in his lifetime, and was a restless spirit in both his career and homelife. To what extent was he a man defined, even haunted, by time?
Additionally, there is the question of how we now respond to Dickens’s novels in relation to both his time and our own. How do Dickens’s works reflect upon the time in which he was living? How do they portray that time to us as 21st century readers? Does Dickens define the Victorian era, or does the Victorian era confine and constrain Dickens’s works and limit the range of their modern reception?
These are just some of the questions we hope to consider on the day. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the theme and warmly encourage Dickensians and scholars of all backgrounds and career stages to apply. Topics could include but are not limited to:
- Dickens in his time - reflections on the Victorian era in Dickens's works
- Dickens and history - reflections on the past in his works, personal history
- Dickens and the future - visions, prophecies, foretellings
- Dickens out of time - adaptations and appropriations
- Dickens fixed in time - historicising and contextualising Dickens today
- Time and order in Dickens's novels - the bildungsroman, serialisation
- Instruments of time - clocks, watches, sundials, chimes
- The oppression of time - deadlines and countdowns
- Dickens and alternate times - counterfactuals and roads not taken
- Dickens and cyclical time - repetition and the return of the repressed
Please send proposals (maximum 500 words) and a short biography (maximum 150 words) to Pete Orford, Emma Curry, Hadas Elber-Aviram and Claire Wood at dickensdayuk@gmail.com.
The deadline for paper proposals is 31 May 2023.
Created 10 May 2023; last modified 12 May 2023