Contingencies and Masterly Fictions: Countertextuality in Dickens, Contemporary Fiction and Theory
Author: Lauren Watson
Date Of Publication: Jun 2010
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-2074-5
Isbn: 1-4438-2074-1
This book establishes deconstructive dialogues between texts which are generically, chronologically and stylistically very different. Each chapter aligns one of Dickens's later novels with a work of contemporary literature and a post structuralist theoretical text. Working from the premise of Derrida's contre, the relationship developed between these texts is not so much intertextual as countertextual: each text re-enacts the procedures of its counterparts, simultaneously rearticulating and interrogating their status. In this triangular mode of reading, the contact zone between countertexts becomes the site on which new readings are generated, readings that use the ambivalent relationship between writings to mark an analogous self-difference within writing itself.

This productive self difference is described as a “negotiation” of the contradictory drives of signification, a strategic management of the masterly and the contingent. This book argues that Dickens's texts perform their negotiations in an acutely strenuous manner, amplifying instability and exposing the means of literary production. This lack of discipline proves contagious as the reader re enacts the text's spasmodic shifts between mastery and contingency. As surrogate Dickensian readers in the countertextual economy, the contemporary novel and post structuralist theory also display this instability an effect which allows this study to develop not only a theory of poetics but a poetics of theory.

This dramatic self difference is not simply restricted to writing, however. In later chapters, this study examines how racial and gender identities are also marked by ambivalence, and how their instability is exacerbated after contact with a Dickensian contre.

In conclusion, the work is itself submitted to a ‘Dickensian’ reading. The author examines how the study’s own manoeuvres have been exposed through contact with many of the texts analysed within it, and how this dialogue deconstructs the ideal of academic writing.

Lauren completed a B.A at St. Martin’s College (University of Cumbria) and a M.A at Liverpool University, before gaining her doctorate at Lancaster University in 2007.

Her main research interests are Victorian culture, the relationship between 19th and 20th century literature and literary theory. This is her first book.

In addition to her research, Lauren has also taught at Lancaster University since 2008.

"In bringing together certain unlikely figures, and placing them in unexpected juxtaposition, Lauren Watson has done Dickensians everywhere an inestimable service with Contingencies and Masterly Fictions’: Contextuality in Dickens, Contemporary Fiction and Theory. This adventurous intertextual study of Charles Dickens demonstrates with verve and commitment the extent to which Dickens was an experimental and profoundly engaged writer, whose practices destabilise repeatedly the reader's relationship with the text and the worlds the text constructs. Illuminating the ways in which Dickens anticipates various critical and authorial discourses of the late twentieth century, Lauren Watson offers us a fascinatingly different Dickens, a Dickens of difference. Producing a countersignature to the Dickensian text, Contingencies and Masterly Fictions’: Contextuality in Dickens, Contemporary Fiction and Theory traces Dickens's own countersignatures to the institutions and cultures of his times."

- Julian Wolfreys, Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, Loughborough University

“This is a wonderful and, in many ways, monumental study. It is intellectually ambitious in the very best possible sense, developing a very original triangular way with the work of Charles Dickens, as each of its four long chapters places one Dickens novel alongside not only a major literary theorist of the late-20th century but also a novel from this same era. The result is a hugely demanding project, requiring a sophisticated grasp of such complex thinkers as Derrida, Kristeva and Bhabha as well such demanding meta-fictions as Ackroyd's Dickens, Carey's Jack Maggs, and Swift's Waterland. Juggling so many texts and writers, Lauren Watson produces a wonderfully impressive labour of intellectual love in which she proves herself more than equal to the enormous challenge she sets herself.

Watson's grasp of the theory is outstanding; and just as strong is her capacity for the closest of reading. The interpretive riches that flow from this combination are very considerable, as time and again the very specific juxtapositions and collisions that arise from each chapter's experiment in triangular reading issue in exhilarating moments of close reading.”

- John Schad, Professor of Modern Literature, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Lancaster

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