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Spectral Dickens

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Spectral Dickens posits a spectral dimension of literary character. By analyzing Dickens’ illustrated novels through a frame of ontologically haunted concepts like the Freudian uncanny, Derridean s...
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  • 31 October 2023
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Drawing on the recent ontological turn in critical theory, Spectral Dickens explores an aspect of literary character that is neither real nor fictional, but spectral. This work thus provides an in-depth study of the inimitable characters populating Dickens’ illustrated novels using three hauntological concepts: the Freudian uncanny, Derridean spectrality, and the Lacanian real. Thus, while the current discourse on character studies, which revolves around values like realism, depth, and lifelikeness, tends to see characters as mimetic of persons, this book invents new critical concepts to account for non-mimetic forms of characterization. These spectral forms bring to light the important influence of developments in nineteenth-century visual culture, such as the lithography and caricature of Daumier and J.J. Grandville. The spectrality of novelistic characters developed here paves the way for a new understanding of fictional characters in general.
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Price: £25.00
Pages: 256
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Series: Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century
Publication Date: 31 October 2023
ISBN: 9781526174543
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / General, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary theory
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'Drawing on graphic traditions of the era, the author describes how Dickens developed objects like dolls and effigies to reinforce meanings beyond the literal. Bove is interested in visual and narrative techniques that move beyond the limits of mimesis.'
CHOICE
(Reprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library Association.)

Spectral Dickens will be of immense interest to those seeking to understand Dickens's enduring appeal for readers and critics alike, especially those with an interest in psychoanalysis and the literary critical paradigms it can enable.'
The Dickensian

'Bove has produced both a work that expands the ways we think about character, and a sustained demonstration of the continuing value of Lacanian thought for literary analysis.'
BAVS newsletter

This is an exciting read for those of us long troubled by the old adage that Dickens is a “failed realist” who does not create convincing characters... a creative and original set of readings of how Dickens’s characters
are so powerful.'
Dickens Quarterly

Introduction: An uncanny ontology of characterisation
Part I Spectral mimesis: portraits, caricature, and character
1 Mimesis’s ghosts: caricature and anamorphosis
2 Spectral character: dreams, distortion, and the (cut of the) real
Part II “Moor eeffocish things”: effigy and the bourgeoisie
3 Where “the specular becomes the spectral” in The Old Curiosity Shop and Dombey and Son
4 Imagos, dolls, and other gazing effigies in Bleak House
Part III Beyond the realism principle: spectral materiality
5 Dream as spectral form in Bleak House and the comic surplus of Micawber in David Copperfield
6 The “As if” hauntology of Little Dorrit and the uncanny dream of the three fathers
Bibliography
Index