The Travelling Doll Wonder: Dickens, Secular Magic, and Bleak House

Evolution and epilepsy in "Bleak House".

In Charles Dickens's novels, nervous seizures trigger dreamy, clairvoyant episodes in which normally imperceptible connections and relations among events and characters come to light. During such episodes, which the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson would describe as "voluminous" states of consciousness, the boundaries of the self dissolve, and the mind becomes attuned to a range of possible i...

Dickens and the passions.

There was a fiction that Mr. Wopsle "examined" the scholars, once a quarter. What he did on those occasions was to turn up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark Antony's oration over the body of Caesar. This was always followed by Collins's Ode on the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge, throwing his blood-stained sword in thunder down, and taking the Warde...

Living doll paper doll.

clinic, what will be waiting to be seen is a person. The Person the doctor sees is the one who has, just at that very moment, arrived at just this point in their biography. The biography is infinitely varied and although normal human physiology might run like a paper blueprint, human lives do not. To be in touch, even remotely, with what is going on in the sort of Sicknesses seen in our clinics...

Collin Bleak

My research primarily uses close analysis of the dynamics of a group or semigroup action on a space to discern properties of the group or semigroup. In particular, I am primarily interested in groups of automorphisms of a space and in semigroups of endomorphisms of a space. Supporting this, I have a secondary focus on topological and symbolic dynamics, which itself has lead me to an interest in...

Leda or Living Doll ? Women as Dolls in Angela Carter ’ s The Magic Toyshop