Dickens! Author and Authorship

John Jordan
Dickens Project
UC Santa Cruz

Held in summer 2012 in honor of the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth, this Dickens Project conference focused on life writing and authorship with reference to the Victorian period generally and to Charles Dickens in particular. Featuring keynote lectures by Professors Robert L. Patten (Rice University) and Rosemarie Bodenheimer (Boston College), the conference addressed a range of topics including biographies (of Dickens and other Victorians); archives and life writing; limits, possibilities, and new approaches to biographical criticism; the idea of the author in contemporary critical discourse; Victorian afterlives; and much more. The conference was attended by faculty and graduate students from UC campuses and from other member institutions of the Dickens Project consortium and included scholars from literary studies and other disciplines in the humanities