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The Global Circulation of Charles Dickens’s Novels
Author(s) -
Gagnier Regenia
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12021
Subject(s) - appropriation , history , ideology , transculturation , state (computer science) , capitalism , sociology , literature , anthropology , law , linguistics , philosophy , politics , political science , art , algorithm , computer science
Following previous contributions on Dickens within the Global Circulation Project, this essay synthesizes research on the global circulation of Dickens in this year of his Bicentenary 2012. It has two sections, beginning with the state of Dickens in the local environment of the UK and moving to the place of Dickens in current debates about World Literatures and Translation Studies. Its second and main section focuses on Dickens outside Britain, Europe, and North America, in terms of geography as well as literary traditions: New Zealand, Australia, Africa, Socialist Poland, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, with some reference to more widely studied areas such as Spanish, Russian, and Indian literary traditions. It urges us to think less in terms of originality and derivation than of circulation, appropriation, use, and their corollaries of transculturation, revoicing, mediation, and triangulation. When we consider the role of Dickens in cultural translation and transculturation, he has “meant” both migration and settlement, class warfare, revolution, critique of neocolonial ideological state apparatuses, care of orphans/children, critique of capitalism, socialism, gender and domestic relations, sociology and psychology of crime and deprivation, Christian solutions to social divisions and suffering, dialect, and the vernaculars of the street. He has represented extreme psychology and individual identity, for which the muletilla (in Galdós, “tagging” for Katherine Mansfield in New Zealand), a pet word or phrase repeated inadvertently showing a character’s “tic” or deep psychology, was much adapted. He has also represented the divisions between country and city, as in Henry Lawson’s studies of an Australian national ethos torn between its traditions of the bush and its rapid centralization in cities. Societies caught between traditional cultures and the forces of modernization give rise to “Dickensian” novels, “Dickensian” characters, “Dickensian” affect, “Dickensian” institutions and so forth, showing that comparable conditions give rise to formal resemblances.