Reading Dickens
Abstract
Discusses communities of readers and the reception of Dickens in 19th century Australia and New Zealand. 'The very large colonial Dickens network, of references to a common corpus of characters, plots and ideas, illustrates both the social process by which reading and writing transfers across distance and manifests a reading community, and the social formation reading participates in: shared reading and shared culture. Mrs Gamp stands as the figure of warning, comedic perhaps, but nonetheless a flag for how the new colony is shaping itself.'
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Published 1 October 2014 in Reading Communities and the Circulation of Print. Subjects: Dickens, Charles, New Zealand history, Reading.
Cite as: Wevers, Lydia. ‘Reading Dickens.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 29, no. 3, 2014, doi: 10.20314/als.8d69e67663.