A Study Of Dialogism In Little Dorrit

As Dickens’ late work,Little Dorrit is different from his other works for that sharply attacks British upper class and ruling class at that time.It reveals evils of Victorian English society,which presents readers a panorama of English society in the 19th century.Little Dorrit has been criticized by different literary critics from different perspectives:Marxism,New historicism and Feminism,but there are few studies on the dialogue of the novel.This thesis will use Bakhtin’s Dialogue Theory to interpret Little Dorrit.Bakhtin first put forward the concept of Theory of Dialogue in his work Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics published in 1929.Bakhtin’s "dialogue"is different from the dialogue that we talk about from a general sense.Bakhtin’s dialogue refers to a more implicit and intangible communication.Different senses or voices,whether they conflict or merge with each other,can be regarded as dialogue as long as they have connection.Bakhtin divided dialogue into two forms:macro dialogue and micro dialogue.Micro dialogue refers to characters’ inner dialogue and macro dialogue is embodied all parts of the work.In other words,it is the potential dialogical relationship between various elements in the work,including dialogue among the characters,among different ideologies,among the author and the characters,etc.According to Bakhtin,dialogue is the premise of the existence of the world and the nature of human life,and human consciousness is dialogical.Meanwhile,Bakhtin pointed out that the whole novel was a macro dialogue.There are many macro dialogues and micro dialogues existing in Little Dorrit,so Bakhtin’s Dialogue Theory provides a good perspective for me to analyze this novel.Based on Bakhtin’s Dialogue Theory,this thesis tries to analyze the potential meaning of the text by listening to the multiple voices in the text.This thesis can be divided into five chapters.The first chapter gives a brief introduction of Dickens and Little Dorrit,then gives a brief introduction of Bakhtin and his Dialogue Theory,and literature review at home and abroad related to the novel,and originality and structure of the thesis.The second chapter analyzes macro dialogue in the novel.By the analysis of multiple dialogues:dialogue between novel and reality,dialogue between multiple narrative units and dialogue between paired characters to embody the dialogical characteristics of the novel.The third chapter mainly analyzes some typical characters,such as Little Dorrit with double personalities,disguised swindler group,hilarious clown Flora and idiot Maggy,and the dialogical use of language to show micro dialogue in the novel.The fourth chapter analyzes unfinalizability in the novel to embody dialogue’s unfinalizability in the novel.The fifth chapter summarizes the full text,through the analysis of the novel,readers can go beyond the text to listen to the multiple voices hiding behind Little Dorrit,and to understand how Charles Dickens used his words to challenge the dominance of Victorian official voices through dialogue among multiple voices.In this way,it shows a picture of equal dialogue among various voices in the society at that time.