Dickens Day
Saturday 18th October 2008

Dickens and After: Stage, Screen, Page . . .

Keynote Speakers: Laura Marcus, Miriam Margolyes and Michael Eaton

For over 170 years Dickens’s work has been tirelessly reinvented and reworked, giving rise to creative adaptations and new versions across all media. From the reappearance of The Pickwick Papers in at least five stage adaptations (or plagiarisms as Dickens saw them) before the novel’s completion, to the Young Vic’s vibrant South African production of A Christmas Carol this winter, reworking Dickens continues to be a major creative industry. Whether on stage, screen, radio or page (as this year’s Booker nominations attest) reworkings of Dickens can offer an important insight into the changing reception of his works and times, providing new critical perspectives.

This one day conference seeks to explore this phenomenon from Dickens’s period to ours. We invite proposals for 20 minute papers on any aspect of the theme, and post-graduate students are warmly encouraged to apply.

Topics could include but are not limited to:

• Self-refashioning: The Public Readings, Character re-appearances, Dickens’s editing of his work
• Dickens and Copyright
• Stage/ prose/ illustrated versions during Dickens’s career
• 20th and 21st century reworkings in all media
• Dickens and Neo-Victoriania
• The Politics of Adaptation
• Rethinking race and nation
• Reworking gender and sexuality
• Class and adaptation
• Dickens for different audiences: the market and marketing

Please send proposals (maximum 500 words), together with details of your institutional affiliation (if any) to Holly Furneaux, on behalf of the organising committee, at hf35@le.ac.uk. The deadline for paper proposals is 1 April 2008

Birkbeck
University of London

University of Leicester