Professor John Bowen (University of York), ‘Diabolical Dickens’

About the speaker:

John Bowen is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York. His main research area is nineteenth-century fiction, in particular the work of Charles Dickens, but he has also written on modern poetry and fiction, as well as essays on literary theory.

His Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (Oxford University Press, 2000) appeared in paperback in 2003, as did his edition of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge for Penguin. 2005 saw the publication of Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, co-edited with Professor Robert L. Patten. He has also contributed to the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, the Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins and has written about Victorian comic and satiric writing for the forthcoming Cambridge History of English Literature.

John reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and has contributed to a number of television documentaries and radio programmes, including BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, In Our Time, Open Book, PM, Today, Woman’s Hour and, most recently, BBC1’s Inside Out and the 2008 Channel 4 documentary Dickens’s Secret Lover.