Keynote Speakers

Matthew Bevis - John Bowen - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst -
and Garrett Stewart.

Plenary Speakers

Corinna Russell - Bharat Tandon - and others.

Conference Outline

The conference addresses the theme of Dickens’s style. Speakers will discuss an exciting variety of subjects. Topics may be conceived thematically, addressing some part of Dickens’s engagement with religion, politics, science, or material culture, for example; or they may focus principally on attributes of his writing techniques: his use of genre, dialogue, reported speech, tone, suspense, different publication formats, and so on. Whatever the principal subject, papers will be united by their attention to relevant features of Dickens’s imaginative writing style, recognising that the work of the critic may be rewardingly directed towards the way Dickens writes inseparably from what he writes about.

Many of the conference speakers have published critical works on Dickens in recent years that have paid close attention to the textures of his writing. Though they address different topics, these works indicate that the style and techniques of Dickens’s writing are complicit in his treatment of many subjects, often in ways that are peculiar to his creative imagination. The conference brings together these voices and in doing so identifies an important strand of recent work on Dickens that attends carefully to Dickens’s style.

Programme

The rest of the speakers will be confirmed here soon. The full programme will be online in January 2011.

The conference will begin at 2pm on Friday 25th March. There will be a keynote paper and a plenary panel session in the afternoon. The conference dinner will take place on Friday evening.

On Saturday 26th March, there will be at least two keynote papers and two plenary panel sessions. The conference will finish by 7pm.

Please note that this schedule is provisional and will be confirmed soon.