- Contemporary Dickens
Contemporary Dickens ambitiously seeks to attribute the genealogy of our contemporary ideas to the Victorians and secondly seeks to underscore the importance of one of the period's major writers, Dickens, to twenty-first-century literary criticism and its current objects of study (i.e. "moral philosophy, the psychology of emotions, liberal theory, life-writing, nationalism and national character" [3]). These are worthy goals, and the anthology for the most part fulfils its stated mission. Indeed, there are a number of essays that are right on target. I'm thinking here of John Bowen's "Uncanny Gifts, Strange Contagion: Allegory in The Haunted Man," Joseph W Childers's "So, This Is Christmas," Karen Chase and Michael Levenson's "Green Dickens," Eileen Gillooly's "Paterfamilias," Deidre David's "Little Dorrit's Theatre of Rage," and Deborah Epstein Nord's "The Making of Dickens Criticism." The above essays are right on target because they not only hit the stated aims of the book but they also satisfyingly reverberate with "green" possibilities, and by this I mean that they are fresh, alive, and interesting. Just as Dickens's The Haunted Man highlights the importance of keeping one's memory green, these essays serve to keep alive the interpretation of Dickens's work for successive generations. Nevertheless, it should be said that an anthology of essays that includes the word "contemporary" in its title runs the risk of firstly not living up to its name and secondly becoming [End Page 482] dated the moment it is published. Perhaps this is because the word "contemporary" conjures up so much more than just a temporal distinction. Not simply pointing to the present moment in time, "contemporary" champions the "newness" of the moment. A museum of contemporary art, for instance, is not just about the display of recent works of art but also the exciting and fresh nature of these works. Indeed, within such a museum we expect to find a collection of bold, innovative, and distinctive art works -pieces that, in short, eschew tradition. Certainly, this is the sort of thing that I expected to find in this collection (albeit literary), but this secondary understanding of "contemporary" seems to be outside the scope of this collection. In the final essay in this anthology, Deborah Epstein Nord draws our attention to Lionel Trilling's 1956 essay "The Dickens of Our Day," which viewed "the rejection of Dickens by early twentieth-century critics and novelists as part of an oedipal rebellion" (272). Trilling's contention aptly serves to highlight the limitations of this latter-day "Dickens of Our Day" text because the chief problem with Contemporary Dickens is that it confines itself to such a narrow understanding of the word contemporary that an oedipal rebellion is quite out of the question. More is the pity because the collection could have done with less deference to masters of literature (Dickens) and literary criticism (the book is dedicated to the George Delacorte Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Columbia University, Steven Marcus) and more bold, ground-breaking and even iconoclastic works of literary criticism.
Aside from stirring up oedipal rebellions, Dickens stirs the pot in any given era because his works contain so many different and often contradictory elements. Accordingly, the job of a good literary critic is not simply to underscore these elements but to be open to the possibilities for explicating these elements in new and interesting ways. Following the well-trodden critical path (no matter how one jazzes it up with erudition) simply does not cut it when one's work appears in a book with an edgy title. There is also another problem with this collection aside from its title, and that is that it has the effect from the outset of distancing or, at worst, alienating readers who are not of the same ilk as the writers in the anthology —readers, for instance, who are not scholars; scholars who are not from the northern hemisphere; or scholars (from any part of the global village) who have not had the good fortune...