Recent Dickens Studies: 2024

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ABSTRACT In Dickens Studies, the year 2024 is marked by interest in (1) Dickens’s lifelong appreciation for, contribution to, and utilization of the arts; (2) his traveling activities, whether undertaken within his native England, Great Britain, Europe, and North America or experienced in the imagination; (3) the identities and responses of his reading publics, those absorbing, engaging with, and even resisting his literary messages and persona during his active career, and ever since, a topic also provoking urgent considerations of how we do and can read Dickens’s dominant cultural works in thoughtful conversation with texts from other cultures; (4) calls in this digital era to fulfill the twentieth-century dream of globalizing Dickens studies, transcending linguistic barriers and traditional centering of scholarship from the Northern Hemisphere; and (5) exploration of Dickens’s evocative powers over Victorian infrastructures and atmospheres, altering the properties of matter, rendering elements symbolic, and exploiting tragedy and comedy in their many cultural aspects to create an unforgettable Dickensian affect, resurrected in Neo-Victorian homages, that can illustrate stark social truths.