Dickens, Violence and the Modern State

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction: Dickens and Dreams of the Scaffold

   • Jeremy Tambling

   Pages 1-16

3. Prison-Bound: Dickens, Foucault and Great Expectations

   • Jeremy Tambling

   Pages 17-47

4. ‘An Impersonation of the Wintry Eighteen-hundred and Forty-Six’: Dombey and Son

   • Jeremy Tambling

   Pages 48-70

5. ‘A Paralysed Dumb Witness’: Allegory in Bleak House

   • Jeremy Tambling

   Pages 71-97

6. Finding the Password: Little Dorrit

   • Jeremy Tambling

   Pages 98-128

7. Dickens and Dostoevsky: Capital Punishment in Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities and The Idiot

   • Jeremy Tambling

   Pages 129-154

8. From Jane Eyre to Governor Eyre, or Oliver Twist to Edwin Drood

   • Jeremy Tambling

   Pages 155-185

9. The Scum of Humanity: Our Mutual Friend

   • Jeremy Tambling

   Pages 186-215

10. Back Matter

    Pages 216-237

    PDF

In a radical reassessment of one of the greatest writers of all time, Dickens, Violence and the Modern State draws on the theories of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, in addition to Julia Kristeva and Edward Said, to situate Dickens within the discourses circulating within his society - in particular those associated with modernity. Focussing on Dickens's novels written after 1848, his relationship to modernity can be seen in his treatment of violence, seen in two forms in his writing: that of the state (in the rationalising powers of Victorian bourgeois modernisation), and physical violence, as portrayed in Dickens's criminals and interest in masochism and corpses.

• Charles Dickens
• novel
• society
• Victorian era
• British and Irish Literature

• University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

  Jeremy Tambling

JEREMY TAMBLING

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