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The lives of Charles Dickens: A metabiography 1870–present

Whitehead, Lucy 2020. The lives of Charles Dickens: A metabiography 1870–present. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University.
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Abstract

This thesis examines the biographical narration of Charles Dickens’s life in the 150 years from his death in 1870 until 2020. Reading published Dickens biographies both as in dialogue with the wider Dickens archive and as archives themselves, I transpose the internationally dispersed Dickens archive from a source to an object of study, re-positioning it as a central yet critically neglected dimension of Dickens’s afterlives in the period. Each chapter situates Dickens as a figure in negotiation with various forms of marginality, countering recent critical framing of Dickens as the exemplar of cultural dominance and canonicity. The study brings together amateur and professional biographical activity, shifting critical focus to the agency of readers as well as writers of published narratives in constructing Victorian biography. By juxtaposing biographical forms of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it revises existing accounts of the relationship of Victorianism with modernism and postmodernism. It develops an original method of reading biography which attends to its genre-specific paratexts and archival underpinnings, contesting a longstanding critical tradition of reading Victorian biography in the light of the Victorian novel. It contributes to the case for biography as a central object of literary critical study. Chapter One educes the ways in which Dickens’s archive and the record of his creative processes which it offers have been mediated by biographical and biographical-fictional works. It opens up space to think about Dickens’s creativity differently. Chapter Two explores the interplay between Forster’s Life of Dickens and the external archival material contained in Grangerizations and photography collections. Both Dickens and Victorian biography are put in motion by the proto-cinematic techniques used across these forms. Chapter Three examines biographies focused on Dickens’s male friendships and female relations, complicating existing scholarly narratives about the ways in which cultural centrality, marginality and gender are manifested in the archive and in biographical texts. Chapter Four investigates how British, French and American biographical forms have deployed the internationally dispersed Dickens archive to shape Dickens in relation to national and international identity, disrupting alignments of Dickens with Englishness or Britishness. Collectively the chapters offer a model for future archival work on Dickens

Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
Date Type: Completion
Status: Unpublished
Schools: English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects: P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Funders: AHRC
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 22 April 2021
Last Modified: 13 Dec 2023 16:29
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/140616

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