17吃瓜

Chris Louttit is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. He is a past President of the Dickens Society, the current Editor-in-Chief of English Studies and has recently been appointed to the Editorial Board of Adaptation. His research focuses on mid-Victorian fiction and its afterlives in popular visual culture and in film and television adaptations. He is the author of Dickens’s Secular Gospel: Work, Gender, and Personality (Routledge, 2009), and has published articles in a variety of scholarly journals including Adaptation, Book History, European Journal of English Studies, Gothic Studies and Philological Quarterly. He has a chapter on web series adaptations of North and South in The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (2026) and is at work on several projects including the Dickens and Mayhew chapter for the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Literature of London and a study of Victorian Bohemian fictions. 

讲座时间：2026年3月18日（周三）13:30-15:30

讲座地点：17吃瓜 闵行校区杨咏曼楼225室

主讲人：Chris Louttit

Scholars working on Victorian Bohemia including Peter Blake, Jacky Bratton, Christopher Kent and James Gatheral have discussed it mainly in relation to periodical studies and theatre history. My lecture questions this straightforward association of Bohemians and Bohemianism with these contexts by uncovering a less familiar connection between the subculture and Victorian popular fiction. It does so by turning attention to the 1860s craze for fictions of Bohemianism that peaked in 1866. As a Saturday Review critic noted that year, ‘The inhabitants of Bohemia have invaded fiction, and run wild and rampant over the scenes of half the novels that are intended and supposed to entertain us’. In this lecture, I map the contours and characteristics of this neglected sub-genre of fiction, noting its origins in French fiction and stray earlier examples of the 1850s before focusing in detail on Annie Edwardes’s Archie Lovell, Annie Thomas’s Walter Goring, Florence Marryat’s For Ever and Ever and Edmund Yates’s Land at Last (all 1866). These novels, I argue, deploy the transgressiveness of Bohemianism to breathe some new life into the by then familiar, even slightly tired, form of the sensation novel. As examples from an intriguing and neglected micro-genre, they offer a new perspective on the mechanics of changing fashions in popular fiction while also reframing our understanding of the sometimes fraught relationship between male Bohemian writers and their female competitors.  

讲座时间：2026年3月19日（周四）13:30-15:30

讲座地点：17吃瓜 闵行校区杨咏曼楼226室

主讲人：Chris Louttit

Over the past five years or so, Dickens has once again become hot televisual property. Adaptations and reworkings of his fictional worlds have proliferated. Viewers have been able to engage with the first instalments of Steven Knight’s so-called ‘Dickens box-set’ with BBC-FX co-productions of A Christmas Carol (2019) and Great Expectations (2023). Both A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations emphasise a dark and frequently Gothicised interpretation of their well-known and frequently-adapted source texts. Intriguingly, at almost the same cultural moment a different way of doing Dickens seems to have emerged in two concurrent neo-Dickensian interpretations of Oliver Twist: the Children’s BBC production Dodger (2022- ) and Disney+ and Star’s The Artful Dodger (2023- ). My lecture reads both series as interventions in the ever-expanding Dickensian and Twistian universes, and as successful examples of neo-Victorian television that take this genre in new directions by blending characters, scenes and themes from Dickens’s second novel together with Victorian historical figures, settings and events from outside of the Dickensian fictional universe.They both, I argue, represent a marked shift away from the ‘Dark Dickens’ mood that has dominated adaptations of the author’s work through much of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

讲座时间：2026年3月20日（周五）9:30-11:00

讲座地点：17吃瓜 闵行校区杨咏曼楼225室

主讲人：Chris Louttit