Contemporary Dickens: Interdisciplinary Research and Criticism - Annotated Bibliography Example

Bibliography Contemporary Dickens: Interdisciplinary Research and Criticism, 2001-present Contents Page Numbers Introduction 3 2. Structural Analysis 5 3. Sociological/Political Analysis 7 4. Psychological/Medical Analysis 9 5. Comparative Analysis 10 Introduction. The aim of this bibliography is to provide the literature student with access to research and analysis of the writings of Charles Dickens between 2001 and the present day. This is not a bibliography of resources for a biography of Dickens, or for a study of critical views of Dickens over time, but more for the student looking at the ways Dickens is being researched and studied at the present time. The report is split into four sections: Structural analysis Sociological/Political analysis Psychological/Medical analysis Comparative analysis The first section refers primarily to literary concerns, focusing only on the writings of Dickens himself. The fourth section is also primarily literary, but compares and contrasts the writings of Dickens with those of his Victorian contemporaries. The second section refers to research on gender and class roles, and political commentary, as they appear in Dickens' works. The third section refers to psychological and medical phenomena observed and described in Dickens' works. Each section is divided into books, periodicals, and graduate research. All of these writings are intended for an academic audience, rather than articles written in popular magazines. The time period (2001-present) guarantees that the research will represent contemporary lines of thought. There has been no hard limit placed on place of publication, because of the universal availability of Dickens' works. While this is not an exhaustive list, it does represent research in several included resources, including: British Library Integrated Catalogue OVID (Journal indexing/abstracting) Google's academic search engine (scholar.google.com) Structural Analysis Books: Abbott, R. 2001. Charles Dickens: a beginner's guide. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Callow, S. 2003. Dickens' Christmas: a Victorian celebration. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Clayton, J. 2003. Charles Dickens in cyberspace: the afterlife of the nineteenth century in postmodern culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Friedman, S. 2003. Dickens's fiction: tapestries of conscience. New York: AMS Press. Hori, M. 2004. Investigating Dickens' style: a collocational analysis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. John, J. 2003. Dickens's villains: melodrama, character, popular culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jordan, J.O. (ed.) 2001. The Cambridge companion to Charles Dickens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mengham, R. 2001. Charles Dickens. Devon: Northcote House. Pykett, L. 2002. Charles Dickens. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Rem, T. 2002. Dickens, melodrama, and the parodic imagination. New York: AMS Press. Sanders, A. 2003. Charles Dickens. New York: Oxford University Press. Srivastava, Deepika. 2001. Charles Dickens: a perspective. New Delhi: Sarum & Sons. Wu, Duncan, and Dunn, R. (eds.). 2004. A Routledge literary sourcebook on Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. New York: Routledge. Journals: Eells, E. 2003. "From word to image: illustrating Great Expectations", Nineteenth Century Contexts, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 219-39. Ferguson, S.L. 2001. "Dickens's public readings and the Victorian author", SEL Studies in English Literature 1500 - 1900, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 729-49. Karl, F.R. 2003. "Recent Dickens studies", Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 31, pp. 593-611. Ledger, S. 2004. "From Queen Caroline to Lady Dedlock: Dickens and the popular radical imagination", Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 32, pp. 575-600. Lougy, R.E. 2002. "Filth, liminality, and abjection in Charles Dickens's Bleak House." ELH, vol. 69, no. 2, pp. 473-500. Mukherjee, A. 2005. "Missed encounters: repetition, rewriting, and contemporary returns to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations", Contemporary Literature, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 108-33. Peng, R.D. and Hengartner, N.W. 2002. "Quantitative Analysis of Literary Styles", The American Statistician, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 175-85. Saville, J.F. 2002. "Eccentricity as Englishness in David Copperfield", SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 781-97. Welsh, A. 2003. "The Letters of Charles Dickens, Volume 12: 1868-1870, and: The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens (review)," Victorian Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 114-8. Sociological/Political Analysis Books Bigelow, G. 2003. Fiction, famine, and the rise of economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, E.A. 2003. Fortune's wheel: Dickens and the iconography of women's time. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Joyce, S. 2003. Capital offenses: geographies of class and crime in Victorian London. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Pritchard, R.E. 2002. Dickens's England: life in Victorian times. Stroud: Sutton. Taylor, J. 2003. Mastery and slavery in Victorian writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wynne, D. The sensation novel and the Victorian family magazine. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Zangen, Britta. Our daughters must be wives: marriageable young women in the novels of Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy. Oxford: P. Lang. Journals: Hunt, L.H. 2004. "Sentiment and Sympathy", The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 62, no. 4, p. 339. Letissier, G. 2004. "Dickens and post-Victorian fiction", Postmodern Studies, pp. 111-128. Litsios, S. 2003. "Charles Dickens and the Movement for Sanitary Reform" Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 183-199. McClure, J.K. 2003. "Seeing through the fog: love and injustice in Bleak House", Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 23-44. Meyer, S. 2005. "Antisemitism and social critique in Dickens' Oliver Twist", Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 33, pp. 239-252. Petch, S. 2002. "The business of the barrister in A Tale of Two Cities", Criticism, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 27-42. Rahn, S. 2003. "Like a star through flying show: Jewish characters, visible and invisible", The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 303-23. Stokes, P.M. 2001. "Bentham, Dickens, and the uses of the workhouse", SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 711-27. Tamai, F. "Globalisation and the ideal of home: Martin Chuzzlewit", Doshisha Studies in Language and Culture, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 27-35. Psychological/Medical Analysis Journals: Cregan-Reid, Vybarr. "Drowning in early Dickens", Textual Practice, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 71-91. Larner, A.J. 2002. "Did Charles Dickens describe progressive supranuclear palsy in 1857" Movement Disorders, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 832-3. Larner, A.J. 2003. Three historical accounts of Giles de la Tourette syndrome. [Online]. http://www.acnr.co.uk/pdfs/volume3issue5/v3i5history.pdf McManus, I. 2001. "Charles Dickens: a neglected diagnosis", The Lancet, vol. 358, no. 9299, pp. 2158-61. Comparative Analysis Books Batra, I. 2001. Poetic justice in eighteenth and nineteenth century British fiction: a study of the novels of Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. New Delhi: Radha Publications. Beer, J.B. 2003. Post-Romantic consciousness: Dickens to Plath. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Frank, L. 2003. Victorian detective fiction and the nature of evidence: the scientific investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gay, P. 2002. Savage reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks. London: W.W. Norton. Meckier, J. 2002. Dickens's Great Expectations: Misnar's pavilion versus Cinderella. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky. Moxham, J. 2002. Interfering values in the nineteenth-century British novel: Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and the ethics of criticism. London: Greenwood Press. Nayder, L. 2002. Unequal partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian authorship. New York: Cornell University Press. Oulton, C. 2002. Literature and religion in mid-Victorian England: from Dickens to Eliot. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Payne, D. The reenchantment of nineteenth-century fiction: Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and serialization. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sawyer, R. 2003. Victorian appropriations of Shakespeare: George Eliot, A.C. Swinburne, Robert Browning, and Charles Dickens. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Journals: Follini, T. 2004. "James, Dickens, and the Indirections of Influence" The Henry James Review, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 228-238. Marcus, S. "Same difference Transnationalism, comparative literature, and Victorian studies", Victorian Studies, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 675-686. Parrinder, P. 2004. "'Turn again, Dick Whittington!' Dickens, Wordsworth, and the boundaries of the city", Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 32, pp. 407-419. Pittock, M. "Peebles v. Plainstances: Jarndyce v. Jarndyce: Scott v. Dickens", Neophilologus, vol. 85, no. 3, pp. 457-75. Pope, N. 2001. "Dickens's "The Signalman" and Information Problems in the Railway Age", Technology and Culture, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 436-461. Small, H. 2004. "The bounded life: Adorno, Dickens, and metaphysics." Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 32: pp. 547-63. Summers, L. 2005. "Bound to please: a history of the Victorian corset", Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 99-113. Thesis Work: Sussler, J. 2002. Nobody's fault: the study of an escape artist in English culture. Master's Thesis, Department of English, Central Connecticut State University. Retrieved on December 14, 2005 from http://fred.ccsu.edu:8000/archive/00000038/ Running Header: Subject Bibliography Search Report Charles Dickens: Recent Critical Views and Interdisciplinary Research 1. Introduction This report outlines the search strategy used to create a bibliography of 60 items concerning recent critical views and interdisciplinary research about the life and writings of Charles Dickens, for an audience of undergraduate and graduate researchers. The search was designed to identify and utilize a range of bibliographic sources so as to ensure that a wide spectrum of research was included. The strategy has three parts: Pre-search process The actual search Evaluation of the search results The role of the pre-search is to maximize the efficiency of the search process itself. This process includes deciding on the intended audience, and on the specific sources to use. Next comes the search itself, which includes a discussion of the process used to select or reject specific items from the final bibliographic list. The classification of sources also comes under discussion, as does an assessment on the probable usefulness of the list of sources for the target audience. Finally, the search strategy is evaluated, with specific strengths and weaknesses, with an eye toward improving future searches. 2. The Pre-Search Process Selection and focus of a topic came first. The life and writings of Charles Dickens would be much too large a topic for a research paper. However, an overview of the body of research and criticism of his work, and of the effects of his writing on other academic disciplines, would be a suitable topic for a research paper. Figure 2.1 shows the outline of the process of narrowing the topic, and of deciding what the final product would generate: a general idea of the direction that Dickensian research has taken in the last five years. 2.1 Outline Define subject Research and criticism of Dickens' work since 2001 Target audience Undergraduate and graduate literature students Materials for inclusion Monographs and books Periodical articles Relevant thesis work Online journal articles Parameters Published 2001-present Considerable focus on Dickens' writings (not purely biographical works) Likely Subheadings Structural analysis Sociological analysis Psychological analysis Comparative studies Bibliographic Sources Monographs/books - BLIC, scholar.google.com, Blackwell Periodicals - scholar.google.com Search Terms Charles Dickens biography Charles Dickens analysis Charles Dickens interpretation Charles Dickens criticism Note: Boolean truncation included crit* to cover critics, and interp* to cover interpreters. 3. Search Process - Books The limit of 2001-present in publication date was necessary, given the desire to focus on the research about Dickens over the last five years. Because of the availability of Dickens' writings throughout the world, regardless of language, no restriction was placed on place of publication. This openness led to the choice of scholar.google.com as an Internet index that would provide results from American, Continental, and other writers. 3.1 scholar.google.com Searches were made using the Advanced Scholar Search link, using the restriction of 2001-2005 on publication dates. Charles Dickens interpretation 2270 hits (books and periodicals) 30 Definite - 717 Possible - 1553 Eliminated Charles Dickens criticism 2072 hits (books and periodicals) 15 Definite - 1640 Duplicate 325 Possible - 192 Eliminated Charles Dickens analysis 1875 hits (books and periodicals) 8 Definite - 1790 Duplicate 42 Possible - 35 Eliminated 3.2 British Library Integrated Catalogue Access to the catalogue was made through the British Library website. Because of the wealth of sources from Google, only one search was tried, without any time limitations. The search was carried out using the browse option. Charles Dickens interpretation 225 hits (books only) 7 Definite - 12 Duplicate -- 206 Eliminated (not in time window) 3.3 Evaluation of book sources The academic search engine provided by Google provided a wealth of sources - both periodical and book sources. However, there were several book sources in the British Library Integrated Catalogue not found by the Google search engine. This points to a necessity to consult multiple bibliographic sources when doing a thorough search. Both databases were easy to use, as far as entering and changing search terms, truncating where desired, and limiting the dates of results. Several books with promising titles were eliminated after analysis on the Google tool, which allows perusal of a book's table of contents and index (but not the text itself, for obvious copyright reasons). 4. Search Process - Periodicals/Journals The Google academic search engine was highly useful in gaining links to abstracts of thousands of relevant articles. The articles that appeared as a result of this search were primarily held by Project Muse or Ingenta Connect in their subscription services, and so research would need to be conducted in a library that subscribed to those organizations in order to gain access to the full text. Based on the high number of definite hits (see section 3.1, as the Google results contain book and periodical hits), no need for further refinement of search terms was needed. Truncation of interpretation and criticism yielded no further hits. Ovid online was also searched, but did not yield any results that were not duplicate with those on the Google results. Because of the academic nature of this topic, no search was made on a more general search engine, such as Google's basic search engine, or Yahoo. 5. Arrangement and usefulness of bibliography The final choice of subheadings was fairly similar to that established in the pre-search process. Because of the number of works analyzing the political dynamics of nineteenth-century British writing, the sociological analysis became sociological/political. Because of the surprising amount of research into medical conditions apparent in some of Dickens' characters, the psychological analysis became psychological/medical. Giving the medical analysis its own category was considered, but rejected due to the psychiatric nature of most of the medical research. The arrangement of each section is alphabetical, following APA guidelines. In general, it is expected that the bibliography's layout will be easy to use. 6. Conclusions The search was generally successful, given the parameter of 60 items. There was a gratifyingly broad spectrum of disciplines represented in the research about Dickensian writing over the last five years, and there is considerable ongoing research into a number of structural and literary topics within Dickens' canon. The evidence of gaps between the Google academic search engine and the British Libraries Integrated Catalog demonstrates a need to check both of those sources, at the very least, before considering a search of this nature complete. The requirement that sources focus on the writings of Dickens, as opposed to primarily biographical works, satisfactorily limited what would have been a far larger pool of results. The original search terms worked fairly well, with the late addition of Charles Dickens analysis to provide a suitable number of works from disciplines beyond literature and history. One area of disappointment was the low number of ongoing graduate work available. It may be that little research is being done in this area in graduate schools, but one area of concern for any researcher in this topic would be to explore further avenues for finding other theses related to contemporary studies of Dickens. Overall, it was fairly easy to locate sufficient material germane to the topic. However, more ongoing writing at the academic level would have strengthened the results yet further. 7. References 1. www.unityweb.org (Accessed 12/14/05 2. http://catalogue.bl.uk (Accessed 12/14/05) 3. www.blackwell.co.uk (Accessed 12/14/05) 4. http://gateway.uk.ovid.com/gw2/ovidweb.cgi (Accessed 12/14/05) 5. http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk (Accessed 12/14/05) 6. scholar.google.com (Accessed 12/14/05) 7. http://gateway.ut.ovid.com/gw1/ovidweb.cgi (Accessed 12/14/05) Read More