Seminar 6. Dickens vs Collins: A Clash of Titans in Dan Simmons's "Drood"
1. How many mysteries have you defined in Charles Dickens's "The Mystery of Edwin Drood"? Have you got your own version of the story?
2. The mystery behind "The Mystery": the background of Dickens's last novel:
- Staplehurst accident;
- professional rivalry;
- family crisis
3. Generic crisis of a Victorian novel: which of generic conventions have been violated by Dickens? by Simmons? What epistemological shift do they represent?
4. What type of unreliable narrator might Simmons’s Willkie Collins be - the Madman, the Liar, the Picaro, the Clown or the Naive?
5. What type of Neo-Victorian biofiction does “Drood” belong to?
6. How does Simmons’s novel interact with its Victorian pretext? What characters and plotlines are being borrowed from Dickens’s novel? Are there any suggestions explaining the nature of Drood? Is he real? What impact does the choice of narrative instances have upon the mystery of Drood?