Dialogic Dickens

The main intention of this volume, which contains only a selection of the papers presented at the events organised by CUSVE in 2012, is not just to convey the range of Dickens’s imagination, but also to show his continuing power. His inventiveness has succeeded in creating novels and characters whose worlds are still dialogically grafted onto the narrations that serve our never-ending needs. Amidst the enormous quantity of critical and biographical publications appearing in the context of Dickens’s bicentenary, this collection is inspired by criteria based above all on the concept of dialogism which, however, is not intended in a strictly Bakhtinian way. Oddly enough, in Italy at least, many have wondered whether Dickens can still be regarded as our contemporary, as if the quality of aesthetic greatness were not in itself an assurance of lasting contemporaneousness. Obviously, all great literary figures are contemporary in the sense that their message – if we want to talk in terms of a message – reaches the reader at any moment in time without losing its universal force.