Monograph published by the School's Joanna Hofer-Robinson

Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth Century Urban Development published by Edinburgh University Press in the prestigious Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture series

Many congratulations to our Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Dr Joanna Hofer-Robinson, whose book has just been published by Edinburgh University Press.

Dickens and Demolition traces and measures the material impact of Dickens' fiction in London's built environment. The book examines how tropes, characters, or extracts from Dickens' fiction were repurposed as a portable terminology in arguments for large-scale demolition and redevelopment projects in London during his lifetime. Commentators with public voices repeatedly mobilised a Dickensian vocabulary to communicate their opinions about how and where London's built environment should be improved in the mid-nineteenth century, or to justify proposed alterations. In analysing allusions to Dickens in a variety of archival sources, including dramatizations, press reports, political debates, and the visual arts, this book asks what cultural work is performed by literary afterlives, and whether we can trace their material effects in the spaces we inhabit.

More information can be found on the publisher's website at https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-dickens-and-demolition.html