ACCOUNTING FOR DICKENS

Credit Hours: 3 · Undergraduate Upper-Level

How do we account for the extraordinary popularity and influence of Charles Dickens from his own time till now? How did he and how have his audiences assigned and extracted value from his writing and his life more generally? The course will focus on Dickens's journalism, novels, shorter fiction, and letters, as well as on visual and verbal adaptations of his work. Readings will include selections of texts from throughout Dickens’s career such as Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, and A Tale of Two Cities.