Discussing his motivation to write Jack Maggs, Carey explains:(Boldtype, 1998) Australians do not like to celebrate this moment when the nation is born, and it has been something of a passion for me to do just.In Charles Dickens' work, Australia is construed as peripheral 'other.' Yet a distinct Australian identity and outlook is being written in Australian Neo-Victorian literature. 109), a strategy Carey has used before with much success in Oscar and Lucinda (1988). The novel's intertextuality with its parent text works “to destabilize the very basis of fictional authority – and with its linear, filial lines of influence between metropolis and former colony” (Thieme, 2001, p. In Jack Maggs, Carey revised Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and its portrayal of Magwitch, the convict, as England's antipodean Other, defined by Carey as “foul and dark, frightening and murderous” (Boldtype, 1998). Like many postcolonial neo-Victorian novels, Peter Carey's second neo-Victorian novel, Jack Maggs (1997), deliberately intervenes in a national archive filled with texts and images that have been inherited from Britain. To email * Your name * Your email * Comment Please tick the box below *Ĭhapter 2. Neo-Victorianism Down Under Peter Carey's Jack Maggs Extract

Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire

Jack maggs