Ebook: Liminal Dickens: Rites of Passage in His Work

Liminal Dickens is a collection of essays which cast new light on some surprisingly neglected areas of Dickenss writings: the rites of passage represented by such transitional moments and ceremonies as births and christenings, weddings and marriages, and death. Although a great deal of attention has been paid to the family in Dickenss works, relatively little has been said about his representations of these moments and ceremonies. Similarly, although there have been discussions of Dickenss religious beliefs, his views on death and dying and his ideas about the afterlife have not been analysed in any great detail. Moreover, this collection, arising from a conference on Dickens held in Thessaloniki in 2012, explores how Dickenss preoccupation with these transitional phases reflects his own liminality and his varying positions regarding some central Victorian concerns, such as religion, social institutions, progress, and modes of writing. The book is composed of four parts: Part One concerns Dickenss tendency to see birth and death as part of a continuum rather than as entirely separate states; Part Two looks at his unconventional responses to adolescence as a transitional period and to the marriage ceremony as an often unsuccessful rite de passage; Part Three analyses his partial divergence from certain widely held Victorian views about progress, evolution, sanitation, and the provisions made for the poor; and Part Four focuses on two of his novels which are seen as transgressing conventional genre boundaries.