Dickens, Sexuality and Gender

Lillian Nayder is Professor and Chair of English at Bates College, USA

Contents: Introduction; Part I Ideals and Transgressions: A sisterhood of rage and beauty: Dickens' Rosa Dartle, Miss Wade and Madame Defarge, Barbara Black; Dombey and Son: the daughter's nothing, Hilary M. Schor; The ideal girl in industrial England, Catherine Robson; Flogging and fascination: Dickens and the fragile will, Natalie Rose. Part II Intersectionalities: The man-of-letters hero: David Copperfield and the professional writer, Mary Poovey; The cannibal, the nurse and the cook in Dickens's The Frozen Deep, Lillian Nayder; 'All the girls say serve him right': the multiple anxieties of Edwin Drood, Suvendrini Perera; Sketches by Boz: the middle-class city and the quarantine of urban suffering, Deborah Epstein Nord; A Tale of Two Cities, Catherine Waters; The erotics of Barnaby Rudge, Natalie McKnight. Part III Mind, Body, Language, Voice: Bodies of capital: Great Expectations and the climacteric economy, Susan Walsh; Dickens's scar: Rosa Dartle and David Copperfield, Mary Ann O'Farrell; Broken mirror, broken words: Bleak House, Carolyn Dever; Dickens and women's stories: 1845-1848 (part one), Margaret Flanders Darby; Undertexts and intertexts: the women of Urania Cottage, secrets and Little Dorrit Jenny Hartley. Part IV Queer Dickens: Homophobia, misogyny and capital: the example of Our Mutual Friend, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; 'Your love-sick Pickwick': the erotics of service, Brian W. McCuskey; The female accessory in Great Expectations, Sharon Marcus; Serial bachelorhood and counter-marital plotting, Holly Furneaux. Part V Gender and the Law: Love after death: the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, Karen Chase and Michael Levenson; Making a spectacle of yourself, or, marriage as melodrama in Dombey and Son, Kelly Hager; Circulation and stasis: feminine property in the novels of Charles Dickens, Deborah Wynne; Name index.