After Dickens

With keynotes from Professor Kamilla Elliott (Lancaster University) and Professor Juliet John (Royal Holloway) and papers on topics from theatrical adaptations of Dickens to headless frogs in Dickens and Darwin and Little Nell in the cyber age, this conference brings together exciting new research into Dickens’s afterlife and legacy, from his influence on social reform and literary criticism to biographies and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond.

The programme is subject to change. A downloadable version can be found here.

(Last updated 20 November)

2nd December (Day 1)

10:30-11:20am	Registration opens (Berrick Saul Building Foyer)
11:20am	Welcome (Bowland Auditorium)
11:30am-12:20pm	Keynote: Dickens After Dickens, Kamilla Elliott (Bowland Auditorium)
12:30-1:50pm	Panels 1 and 2 Panel 1: Dickens Ahead of His Time(Bowland) Chair: Emily Bowles Extra-super, John Bowen Charles Dickens: Teller of Magic-Realist Tales, Peter Cook Narration After the French Revolution: Dickens and the Invention of Film, Gail Turley Houston  Panel 2: Adapting Dickens (Treehouse) Chair: Richard Pearson Grand Aspirations: Putting Pip on the Stage, Michael Eaton ‘Happy ever arter’: Reconfiguring Hearth and Home in Victorian Theatrical Adaptations of The Pickwick Papers, Jennifer Miller Auteurship and Interpretation: David Lean and Alfonso Cuarón’s Representation of Great Expectations, Holly Eckersley
1:50-2:30pm	Lunch (Berrick Saul Building Foyer)
2:30-3:50pm	Panels 3 and 4 Panel 3: Translating Dickens (BS/008) Chair: Brendan Whitmarsh Translating Dickens: L’Abîme (No Thoroughfare) at the Vaudeville Theatre, Paris, in 1868, Richard Pearson ‘The National Razor’: How Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities pervaded Nineteen-Eighties Television Screens and the Social and Political Climate, Ann-Marie Richardson Dickens’s Nordic After-Life: Dickensian Resonances in the Work of Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Kathy Rees Panel 4: Dickens and America (Treehouse) Chair: Rebecca Butler Anti-American Notes: A Dickensian Backlash, Adam Abraham The American Dickens: Analysing Charles Dickens’s Relationship with America and the Discourse of Celebrity in Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens (2009), José Viera Boys and ‘Mentors’ on Both Sides of the Atlantic: Fagins,   Sikeses and Olivers, Davids; Injun Joes, Pap Finns and Toms, Huckleberry Finns, Sema Ege
3:50-4:10pm	Break (Berrick Saul Building Foyer)
4:10-5:30pm	Panels 5 and 6 Panel 5: Dickensian Afterlives (BS/008) Chair: Claire Wood ‘The Mystery, not the History, of Edwin Drood’: The Interwar Speculations, Camilla Ulleland Hoel The Contemporary ‘Dickensian’ Novel: The Goldfinch, A Case Study, Rob Jacklosky Little Nell in the Cyber Age, Francesca Arnavas Panel 6: Co[s]p[la]ying Dickens (Treehouse) Chair: Hadas Elber-Aviram  The Pickwick Club: Love, Politics, and Cosplay in 1837, Maureen England Cheeky Cockneys and Artful Villains: The Life of Dickens’s Cockney Characters and their Language Beyond his Novels, Alice Turner The Unfinished Picture: The Mystery of Rosa Bud, Pete Orford
6-7pm	Performance: Fagin’s Last Hour, presented by Brother Wolf in association with Harrogate Theatre, adapted and performed by James Hyland (Bowland Auditorium). Included in the conference fee.
7-7:30pm	Post-Performance Q&A (Bowland Auditorium)
8pm	Dinner at ASK Italian, York’s 18th-Century Assembly Rooms (optional extra, email emily.bowles@york.ac.uk to sign up)

3rd December (Day 2)

9:30am	Registration (Berrick Saul Building Foyer)
10:00-10:50am	Keynote: Crowdsourced Dickens, Juliet John (Bowland Auditorium)
11:00am-12:20pm	Panels 7 and 8 Panel 7: Mediated Lives (Bowland) Chair: Yusuke Wakazawa The Dickensian orchestral work: symphony or polyphony?, Jeremy Parrott Dickens’s Old Men: George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates and Dickensian Influence, Emily Bowles Chesterton’s Charles Dickens: Shaping Dickens’s Afterlife, Charlotte Arnautou Panel 8: Dickens as Intertext (Treehouse) Chair: Kathy Rees ‘Dickens, their chosen apostle!’: The Dickensian Politics of Frances Dickinson’s Periodical Travel Writing, Rebecca Butler Dickensian Realism in The Wire, Laurena Tsudama Beckett’s Dickens: Influence and Inheritance in ‘First Love’ and Murphy, Hunter Dukes
12:20-1pm	Lunch (Berrick Saul Building Foyer)
1-2:20pm	Panels 9 and 10 Chair: Simonetta Falchi Panel 9: Digital Dickenses (Bowland) CLiC Dickens: Reading Concordances and Characters, Michaela Mahlberg Bleak House and Social Network Analysis: Dickens Through the Macroscope, Gerardine Meaney Dickens and Meme: Digital Media and Creative Criticism, Emma Curry   Panel 10: Dickens on History (Treehouse) Chair: Sarah Murphy Fictional Archives, Joanna Robinson Dickens and the Black Masks of History: Re-envisioning the Past in Hard Times, Sara Malton After Dickens, Utopia: Reading Dickens in Bellamy’s Looking Backward and Morris’s News from Nowhere, Hadas Elber-Aviram
2:20-2:40pm	Break (Berrick Saul Building Foyer)
2:40-4pm	Panels 11 and 12 Panel 11: Legacies of Violence (Bowland) Chair: Adam Abraham The Death of Nancy Sykes on the Nineteenth-Century Stage, Michael Gilmour The Great Expectations of Dickensian Prequels: Miss Havisham and the Cruelty of Optimism, Claire O’Callaghan PCKWCK: An Experiment in Anxiety, Simonetta Falchi Panel 12: Creating Character (Treehouse) Chair: Christine Corton Mediating Reflexive Expression: Headless Frogs in Dickens and Darwin, Harriet Newnes Detective Dickens: A New Version of Charles Dickens, Jean Briggs Articulating the Past: Adaptation, Casting and Black British Histories in Dickensian (BBC, 2016), Rachel Carroll
4-4:20pm	Break (Berrick Saul Building Foyer)
4:20-5:40pm	Panels 13 and 14 Panel 13: New Voices (Bowland) Chair: Gail Turley Houston ‘Recalled to Life’: From Bleak House to Tom-All-Alone’s, Lynn Shepherd Charles Dickens and the Modern Postcolonial Imagination, Jan-Melissa Schramm Dickens and Switzerland after Dickens, Christine Gmür Panel 14: Traces of Dickens (Treehouse) Chair: Peter Cook Stenography and Orality in Dickens: Rethinking the Phonographic Legacy, Hugo Bowles Dickens, Fog and the Hereafter, Christine Corton
5:40pm	End

Supported by the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS): bavs.ac.uk, the Dickens Society and the Modern School of the English Department, University of York.