Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change

Sixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change to show how Dickens was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy in the Inimitable's protean style, registered and commented on the ongoing changes in the Victorian world while the Victorians' fictional and factional worlds kept (and keep) changing. The essays from notable Dickens scholars—Malcolm Andrews, Matthias Bauer, Joel J. Brattin, Doris Feldmann, Herbert Foltinek, Robert Heaman, Michael Hollington, Bert Hornback, Norbert Lennartz, Chris Louttit, Jerome Meckier, Nancy Aycock Metz, David Paroissien, Christopher Pittard, and Robert Tracy—suggest the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated in Dickens' works through four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. An afterword by the late Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens changed the life of one eminent Dickensian.

Joachim Frenk is Professor of British Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University. Lena Steveker is Assistant Professor of British Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University.

Excellent discussions of condition-of-England novels.

An enjoyable and wide-ranging collection of articles exploring Dickens and change.

This collection proves Dickens to have been a keen student of change throughout his life. Its contributors... consider how Dickens promotes social change, how he presents changes of power, how he changes his own techniques, and finally how his presentation of change has inspired others.... As this impressively kaleidoscopic collection attests, Dickens's discussions of change remain a stimulating topic well over a century later.

This book will delight Dickens scholars and prove an asset to any university library.... It is one that will inspire readers to consider the changes the great writer has wrought in them, and that they, in their turn, may bring to Dickens scholarship.