Victorian Print and Popular Culture Seminar Series
Liverpool John Moores University
April 20th 2011 - Dr Juliet John (University of Liverpool) Dickens, Mass
Culture and the Machine
To be held in room 103, Dean Walters Building, St James Road, Liverpool,
between 5pm and 6.30pm.
That the idea of Dickens and the adjective 'Dickensian' continue to have
a cultural resonance which extends beyond the book-buying public almost
two centuries after Dickens's birth is testimony to his sense of himself
as a mass cultural artist. This paper contends that Dickens's popularity
is unique, different even from that of Shakespeare because, writing in
'the first age of mass culture', Dickens was instinctively aware of the
changed context of art, or of the need for popular art to find its place
in an age of mechanical reproduction. It examines Dickens's attitudes to
Culture and the machine, looking forward to the importance of machines
to Dickens's afterlives, and back to the real and symbolic importance of
machines in his own day. The first part contends that at the heart of
the ambivalence about Dickens in literary criticism from his own day to
ours is an association between Dickens's fictional work and the machine,
informed by the opposition between the machine and the idea of Culture
influential in Victorian and subsequent cultural theory. My contention
is that that Dickens occupies a threshold position in cultural history,
his aesthetics and philosophies informed by both a mechanical and an
organicist conception of art. The second part discusses prominent
aspects of Dickens's posthumous cultural legacy (film, heritage, and the
so-called theme park 'Dickens World'), demonstrating the importance of
this threshold between the machinic and the organic to Dickens's
influence, and to cultural perceptions of Dickens.
Organised by Dr Clare Horrocks (Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture and
Communication)
Dr Clare Horrocks
(LJMU Early Career Researcher Fellow 2010-11)
Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture, Communication
Dean Walters Building
Liverpool John Moores University
St James Road
L1 7BR
Tel: 0151 231 5035
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