Hello All,

Below, please find the readings for this week’s seminar, in which I will present my on-going work on Dickens’ Oliver Twist. I have included two of my own draft pieces.  The first will hopefully be the first section of my first dissertation chapter, “Oliver Twist’s Silence, Fagin’s Villainy, and the Hazards of Anti-Poor Law Authorship:
Dickens’ Narrative Politics.” The second is a conference paper that I presented to the Graduate Student Forum last month.  I am including this conference paper for two reasons. First, it provided the material that eventually turned into the first chapter.  Second, it will hopefully give you an idea of the close readings that will inform the second half of the chapter, which is currently unfinished.  Though the conference paper did obviously inform the chapter draft, I think that I have taken the work in a new direction and I’m interested to hear your opinions.  As a caveat, these two pieces are very much works in progress–they may still be very rough in some places. Additionally, the conference paper is very conversational; I hope you aren’t too distracted by that!

I have also provided a secondary piece by Elaine Hadley from her book, “Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace.”  I took a section from her third chapter that I thought would be most helpful in understanding the context in which I am writing.

Best,

Khristina

Gonzalez, Chapter One-Oliver Twist-First Draft

Gonzalez, Conference Paper-Oliver Twist

Hadley, Theatricalized Dissent