The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th-century European Novelists
This book provides an overview of the literary grotesque in 19th-century Europe, with special emphasis on Charles Dickens, whose use of this complex aesthetic category is thus addressed in relation with other 19th-century European writers. The crossing of geographical boundaries allows an in-depth study of the different modes of the grotesque found in 19th-century fiction. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the reasons behind the extensive use of such a favoured mode of expression. Intertextuality and comparative or cultural analysis are thus used here to shed new light on Dickens’s influences (both given and received), as well as to compare and contrast his use of the grotesque with that of key 19th-century writers like Hugo, Gogol, Thackeray, Hardy and a few others.
The essays of this volume examine the various forms taken by the grotesque in 19th-century European fiction, such as, for example, the fusion of the familiar and the uncanny, or of the terrifying and the comic; as well as the figures and narrative techniques best suited for the expression of a novelist’s grotesque vision of the world. These essays contribute to an assessment of the links between the grotesque, the gothic and the fantastic, and, more generally, the genres and aesthetic categories which the 19th-century grotesque fed on, like caricature, the macabre and tragicomedy. They also examine the novelists’ grotesque as contributing to the questioning of society in Victorian Britain and 19th-century Europe, echoing its raging conflicts and the shocks of scientific progress. This study naturally adopts as its theoretical basis the works of key theorists and critics of the grotesque: namely, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire and John Ruskin in the 19th century, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Wolfgang Kayser, Geoffrey Harpham and Elisheva Rosen in the 20th century.
Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar is Senior Lecturer in British Literature at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand. She wrote her PhD on the gothic novel in Britain (1764–1824), and has published several articles on the persistence of the gothic in the Victorian novel and in the sensation novel. Her research now focuses on Dickens and Charlotte Brontë. She is the editor of a volume on the representation of wandering children in 19th-century literature, titled Enfance et errance dans la literature européenne du dix-neuvième siècle (Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2011).
Max Vega-Ritter is Emeritus Professor of 19th-century British Literature at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand. He wrote his PhD on Dickens and Thackeray. He has edited two issues of Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens devoted to Charles Dickens’s fiction, the second more specifically to “Dickens and Madness”, and co-edited a volume on gender issues in European fiction, titled L'un(e) mirroir de l'autre (Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal).
"The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th-Century European Novelists, edited by Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar and Max Vega-Ritter, manages to shed some new light on a topic that has been the subject of much discussion since the publication of Michael Hollington’s Dickens and the Grotesque [1984]."
Year's Work in English Studies, 95: 1 (2016)
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