Dickens, Violence and the Modern State

In this reassessment of Dickens, the author draws on the theories of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, in addition to Julia Kristeva and Edward Said, to situate Dickens within the discourses circulating within his society - in particular those associated with modernity. Focusing on Dickens's novels written after 1848, his relationship to modernity can be seen in his treatment of violence, seen in two forms in his writing: that of the state (in the rationalizing powers of Victorian bourgeois modernization), and physical violence, as portrayed in Dickens's criminals and interest in masochism and corpses.