Overview
- Concentrates on three techniques for the production of social space (counter-mapping, overlaying and troping) within Dickens’s novels and paratext
- Examines the scapes and writings which influenced him and the way he transformed them, packaged them and passed them on for future use
- Speaks to areas such as urban studies in addition to literary studies
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (PNWC)
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About this book
This book explores the aesthetic practices used by Dickens to make the space which we have come to know as the Dickensian City. It concentrates on three very precise techniques for the production of social space (counter-mapping, overlaying and troping). The chapters show the scapes and writings which influenced him and the way he transformed them, packaged them and passed them on for future use. The city is shown to be an imagined or virtual world but with a serious aim for a serious game: Dickens sets up a workshop for the simulation of real societies and cities. This urban building with is transferable to other literatures and medial forms. The book offers vital understanding of how writing and image work in particular ways to recreate and re-enchant society and the built environment. It will be of interest to scholars of literature, media, film, urban studies, politics and economics.
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Keywords
Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Introduction
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Front Matter
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Counter-Mapping: The New Information Maps of Dickens
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Front Matter
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Overlaying and Ghosting: London as America, Africa, Arctic, India
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Front Matter
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Troping: Sensing the City and the Acts of Reading and Writing
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“It is a topic that has appealed to scholars and anyone fascinated by Britain’s world city, but also by the representation of urban experience as a phenomenon of modernity, as well as postmodernity.” (Efraim Sicher, Dickens Quarterly, Vol. 37 (1), March, 2020)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Estelle Murail is Research Fellow in the LARCA research centre at the University of Paris Diderot, France. She also teaches at the at the Lycée Saint-Jean de Passy in Paris. She gained her jointly-supervised PhD in English Literature at the Université Paris Diderot and King’s College London. Her PhD examined the figure of the flâneur in London and Paris in the Nineteenth Century. She has published several articles on flânerie, London and Paris in literature. She has taught English Literature and translation at the Université Paris-Diderot, at the Université Paris Est Marne-La-Vallée and at Sciences-Po Paris.
Sara Thornton is Professor of English at the University of Paris Diderot, France, where she teaches nineteenth-century literature and cultural studies. She is president of the SFEVE (Société Française d’Etudes Victoriennes et Edouardiennes). She has published Advertising, Subjectivity and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), David Copperfield (2006), Circulation and Transfer of Key Scenes in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2010), Persistent Dickens (with Alain Jumeau, 2012), and Littérature et publicité (co-edited with L. Guellec and F. Hache-Bissette, 2012). She is currently working on the way aesthetics responds to economic pressures in the nineteenth-century in Britain and the Empire.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Dickens and the Virtual City
Book Subtitle: Urban Perception and the Production of Social Space
Editors: Estelle Murail, Sara Thornton
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-35086-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-35085-1Published: 24 October 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-81720-0Published: 17 May 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-35086-8Published: 14 October 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6494
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6508
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 295
Number of Illustrations: 24 b/w illustrations
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, British and Irish Literature, Urban Geography / Urbanism (inc. megacities, cities, towns)