Introduction: Dickensian Views

International audienceThis collection of essays entitled Dickensian Prospects aims to put Dickens’s work into perspective by using specific strategies inspired from the field of vision. The idea is to offerunusual insights into Dickens’s writing by showing how he himself at times skilfully changed his focus, adopted unusual vantage points and used frames that transformed the appearance of viewed objects. These alternative ways of looking allow the essays to explore new horizons in Dickens’s aesthetics. Some highlight his meticulous care for detail and the way he looked closely into things, while others examine the contrasting effects of the bird’s-eye views he also adopted. Other essays still pinpoint false perspectives and relevant blind spots in his work. Dickens himself played with clever optical effects to intrigue and occasionally mislead his readers. He also resorted to mental pictures that offered stimulating possibilities of approaching and considering his work. All in all, these essays informed by visual metaphors provide fresh insights into Dickens’s world.Mirroring as it does the fruitful working relationship between scholars from across Denmark, France, Italy, the UK and further afield, notably the US, the present volume reflects upon the latest developments in Dickens scholarship. The ten contributions gathered here provide intriguing reconsiderations not only on the fiction and personal writings of Dickens, but also on Dickens’s own prospects on the world. For reasons of clarity three divisions have been adopted – Sight, Insight and Sightlessness in Dickens, Reframing Dickens, Widening Prospects – but these groupings should not, hopefully, prevent readers from discerning both the manifold perspectives and close interrelatedness of the contributions