This work explores Dickens’s perception of Italy as it appears in the travel book Pictures from Italy. Corpus methodologies, alongside the notion of intersectionality, display the writer’s multi-faceted interpretation of the Italians and his efforts to highlight their multidimensionality and heterogeneity. The book debates that Pictures from Italy departs from conventions – it investigates the function of travel in the construction of Italian identity and discusses Dickens’s relationship with Italy. Corpus linguistics methodologies analyse the language of the book and shed newlight on the relationship between body language and culture.

The nineteenth century was the heyday of travel, with Britons continually reassessing their own culture in relation to not only the colonized but also other Europeans, especially the ones that they encountered on the southern and eastern peripheries of the continent. Offering illustrative case studies, Katarina Gephardt shows how specific rhetorical strategies used in contemporary travel writing produced popular fictional representations of continental Europe in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Bram Stoker. She examines a wide range of autobiographical and fictional travel narratives to demonstrate that the imaginative geographies underpinning British ideas of Europe emerged from the spaces between fact and fiction. Adding texture to her study are her analyses of the visual dimensions of cross-cultural representation and of the role of evolving technologies in defining a shared set of rhetorical strategies. Gephardt argues that British writers envisioned their country simultaneously as distinct from the Continent and as a part of Europe, anticipating the contradictory British discourse around European integration that involves both fear that the European super-state will violate British sovereignty and a desire to play a more central role in the European Union.

An accessible and reliable introduction to the life and works of Charles Dickens, offering a unique combination of academic biography and literary analysis The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens explores the relationship between Dickens’ lived experience and his works, discussing themes within and key influences on literary classics such as Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, and Great Expectations. An excellent introduction to the world of Dickens scholarship, this easily accessible volume provides the necessary background about the author’s life while encouraging readers to critically analyze Dickens’ works. Organized thematically by chapter, the book opens with a brief overview of Dickens’ life and a chronology of major works. Subsequent chapters focus on key aspects of Dickens’ life, concluding with case studies of selected texts that demonstrate the similarities between events in Dickens’ own life and the literature he was writing at the time. Throughout the book, readers are provided with an informative portrait of Dickens’ early family life, personal relationships, professional networks, social circles, travels abroad, charitable works, financial issues, dealings with publishers, and much more. Incorporates the latest discussions in Dickens research alongside documents and materials from Dickens’ time Discusses the afterlife of Dickens in film, theater, and television, including A Christmas Carol, Dickens’ most adapted story Features archival material from the Charles Dickens Museum and discussion of Dickens’ roles as a journalist, editor, and professional reader Includes short case studies at the end of each chapter to demonstrate the ways Dickens’ life informed his work The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens is an ideal introductory textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in English Literature and Victorian Literature courses, as well as a valuable resource for Dickens scholars and enthusiasts.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

‘Dickens and America’ has been amply studied, his no less important relationship to Italy much less so, despite his friend Forster's assertion that his long stay in Genoa represented ‘the turning-point of his career.’ This book, arising from a major conference held in Genoa in 2007, attempts to redress the balance, focusing primarily on Dickens's two major writings about Italy—the travel book Pictures from Italy of 1845, and Part Two of his great novel Little Dorrit of 1855–7. It falls into six sections: the first concerns Dickens's enjoyment of leisure for the first time in his life in Italy; the second, his response to the visual attractions of Italy, both natural and artistic; the third, his political stance about Italy in the period of the Risorgimento; the fourth, his preoccupation with death and decay in what he saw and experienced in Italy; the fifth, his representation of ‘Italianness’ in Little Dorrit and elsewhere; and the sixth, his relation to modern and contemporary writers about Italy. It thus aims to fill a vital gap in Dickens studies.

From childhood, Charles Dickens was fascinated by tales from other countries and other cultures, and he longed to see the world. In Dickens and Travel, Lucinda Hawksley looks at the journeys made by the author – who is also her great great great grandfather. Although Dickens is usually perceived as a London author, in the 1840s he whisked his family away to live in Italy for year, and spent several months in Switzerland. Some years later he took up residence in Paris and Boulogne (where he lived in secret with his lover). In addition to travelling widely in Europe, he also toured America twice, performed onstage in Canada and, before his untimely death, was planning a tour of Australia. Dickens and Travel enters into the world of the Victorian traveller and looks at how Charles Dickens’s journeys influenced his writing and enriched his life.

The Oxford Dickens edition of Pictures from Italy puts the spotlight on Dickens's 'little book' describing his travels through Italy in 1844 and 1845. Throughout, Dickens offers his withering reviews of Italian masterpieces, his staunch criticism of Catholicism in Rome, tempered with a genuine love and admiration for the people of Italy and the country's rich cultural heritage. This is the first full critical edition of the work, with detailed research outlining its composition and form, and comparisons made between all editions produced during Dickens's lifetime. First written as personal letters, then printed as newspaper correspondence, then reshaped once more into a single book, the evolution of Pictures from Italy provides a fascinating insight into Dickens's creative and editorial process. Pete Orford's introduction puts the work under the microscope to track the changes made across these several iterations and uncover the story of its genesis and development. Analysis of the few remaining manuscript pages and Orford's own travels through Italy help to unpick several mysteries of the text. Previous editions of the work have been for general readership with critical essays that focus on the time Dickens spent in Italy (1844-5). This edition offers a different approach, supplementing this familiar story with the lesser discussed period of 1846 when Dickens, back in London, first turns his various letters into newspaper correspondence, then a monograph, whilst battling the pressures of launching a daily newspaper and planning a new novel. Dickens's time in Italy defines the content of the book, but it is his subsequent time in London which defines its shape and structure. This edition reproduces in situ the original illustrations provided by Samuel Palmer for the first edition of 1846, with further illustrations provided for subsequent editions contained in the appendices.

The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts explores Dickens's rich and complex relationships with a myriad of art forms and the far-reaching resonance of his works across the arts overall. This volume reassesses Dickens's prescient philosophy of art, both through a historical and a present-day lens and in the context of debates about the cultural value of the arts. Across thirty-three original essays, it outlines the ways in which Dickens broke down oppositions between high and low art, money and the aesthetic, the extraordinary and the ordinary, and art for its own sake and the social good. In doing so, it considers how Dickens prefigured the arts of the future, including rap music, television, fanfiction and global cinema.