CfP: “Dickens and the Gothic” – Dickens Day 2024

Dickens Day 2024: “Dickens and the Gothic”
Saturday 12th October 2024 | Senate House, London

This year’s topic is ‘Dickens and the Gothic’. Dickens’s works frequently embraced and interrogated the Gothic mode. Within his works we find classic Gothic tropes such as the supernatural, family secrets, grotesque characters, hidden threats, generational mysteries, haunted landscapes and crises of identity. While his shorter fiction frequently encompassed the fantastic, his novels also integrated Gothic elements into urban environments. We look forward to exploring Dickens’s use of the Gothic to consider how he was inspired by Gothic works before him, and how he went on to inspire Gothic works after him.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the theme and warmly encourage Dickensians and scholars of all backgrounds and career stages to apply. Topics could include but are not limited to:

• The supernatural – ghosts, goblins and visions
• Violence and crime – murder, jealousy and schemes
• Villains and monsters
• The Gothic landscape – haunted houses, isolated locales and threatening urban spaces
• The fractured self – doubles, split personalities, twins and the uncanny
• Dickens’s Gothic influences – Dickens’s reading of Gothic texts, and Gothic echoes in his work
• Dickens’s Gothic legacy – adaptations, appropriations and new Gothic literature inspired by Dickens
• Dickens’s Gothic satire – exploring Dickens’s mocking of Gothic tropes and cliché
• International Gothic – exoticism, xenophobia and foreign threats

Please send proposals (maximum 500 words) to Pete Orford, Emma Curry, Hadas Elber-Aviram and Claire Wood at dickensdayuk@gmail.com. The deadline for paper proposals is 30 June 2024.