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Dickens the Narrator
Michael Shelichach, a lecturer at Queens College, shares a ghastly passage from Oliver Twist with clues to help illuminate Dickens as the writer and narrator.
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David: Debauched, Dissipated, Drunkd
Dickens Universe devotees Serena Buie, Christian Lehmann, and Mira Rao discuss Chapter 24 of David Copperfield and reflect upon the camaraderie and the darker undertones present in their selected passages.
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Shipwreck, Storm, and Narrative Disingenuity in David Copperfield
Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member, Wayne Batten, examines narrative evasions, revealing by concealing, and silence as self-deception in David Copperfield.
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Illustrating ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’
Christian Lehmann, Faculty of Literature at Bard High School Early College Cleveland, describes how The Old Curiosity Shop’s illustrators maintained visual cohesion while playfully engaging one another across the weekly parts.
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Dear lola, Love South LA: A Film Festival
You are cordially invited to join us for the premiere screening of Dear Iola, Love South LA, a film festival produced by South L.A. teens, all inspired by their journey with the 19th-century novel ‘Iola Leroy’ by Frances E. W. Harper, one of the most influential African American woman activists of her period. Celebrate these…
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Dickens in the Digital Age
Join the Deciphering Dickens team on Thursday, February 18, 2021, from 1:00-6:00 PM (GMT) to explore the V&A’s Dickens collections and discuss exciting new approaches to how we might read, edit, and share historical materials in the digital age, both in Dickens’s case and beyond.
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Remembering Gerhard Joseph
This week, we will be revisiting Professor Joseph’s “David Copperfield, the Hero of David Copperfield,” from September 28, 2020. In this episode, he asserts that by viewing David Copperfield within the context of the novel, Charles Dickens’s life, and within the reader’s own life, David Copperfield must, indeed, be the hero of his own life.
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Dickens’s Favorite Son
Phyllis Orrick, a former journalist and retired research editor at UC Berkeley returns to discuss a novel “built around a character who represents the purest version of the ideal of the boy-child/son Dickens so often alludes to with obvious affection throughout his works,” Barnaby Rudge. TRANSCRIPT: Hello again, I am Phyllis Orrick and I couldn’t help…
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Conscience is a Dreadful [and Slippery] Thing
Summer Star, Associate Professor of English at San Francisco State University, shares a passage from Great Expectations about moral consciousness. She describes it as “one of the most brilliant, humorous, and physical allegories for moral discomfort I have ever encountered: having a slice of buttered bread down one’s pant leg.” TRANSCRIPT: Hello: I’m Summer Star, Associate Professor…
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Quarantine, Bureaucracy, and More: The Relevance of Charles Dickens’s ‘Little Dorrit’ Today
If you want a grasp of why and how the nineteenth-century novel matters now, indulge yourself in four brilliant essays on Charles Dickens’s ‘Little Dorrit,’ brought to you by ‘Nineteenth-Century Literature.’ The mix of essays reminds us that sometimes we do our best and most ambitious theoretical work by eyeing sharply a novel that can…
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Sounding Out Scrooge
Reading A Christmas Carol aloud brings new immersive delights to the story. Helene Androski, retired Reference and Instruction Librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, demonstrates with a favorite passage describing Scrooge. TRANSCRIPT: Hi, this is Helene Androski sheltering at home in Madison, Wisconsin, and missing all my new made friends from the Dickens universe. I would like to…
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The Carol Philosophy
Carl Wilson, Friends of the Dickens Project Board Member, discusses the charity, altruism, and redemption behind Dickens’s Carol Philosophy. TRANSCRIPT: I have read A Christmas Carol every year for more than fifty years, facilitated discussions about the story, and even have written a novel loosely structured after Dickens’s first Christmas book. And I have seen at least…