Cross-cultural adaptation of dickensian spatiality: The case of Little Dorrit

This essay uses Little Dorrit as a case study to investigate how the political and social ideas which Charles Dickens articulates through his manipulation of space and place were captured, adapted, or reconfigured for another culture-early twentieth-century China, where readers had little experience and contact with the world which Dickens portrays. In his narrative, Dickens makes use of the contrast, or sometimes tension, between the socially constructed space and the physically constituted built structure to capture the urban experience that Victorians encountered and their anxieties amidst rapid social change. This essay first examines the nature of this complex relationship before proceeding to consider how the processes of cross-cultural transfer from Britain to China can become a means through which the spatial relations are subverted, hence destabilizing or even transgressing the social values and ideology that underline Dickens's works. © 2012 The Author.