Dickensian Rewritings And Cultural Memory

Dickensian rewriting in the present study refers to the fictional narratives written by contemporary Australian novelists through appropriating and/or parodying characters,plots of Dickens's works,his writing techniques or his life experiences.This dissertation examines four novels by Australian novelists:Michael Noonan's Magwitch(1982),Carmel Bird's The Bluebird Cafe(1990),Peter Carey's Jack Maggs(1997)and Richard Flanagan's Wanting(2008).The dissertation takes critical theory on postcolonialism and study on Aboriginal culture as reference and "Cultural Memory" as a controlling concept which summarizes the remembrance of historical figures,events or eras with the assistance of tangible or intangible cultural forms,such as texts,images,festivals,rituals,etc.Because Australia was once a British settler colony,the Australian novelists' rewriting of British canon is generally identified as "writing back to the empire".The dissertation points out that the four rewritings under discussion cannot be classified into this category and that the four novelists' rewriting of Dickens's works does not signify their total disapproval of those works.Instead,Dickens's works are both the object of resistance because of the imperial structure of feeling inherent in them and the object of reverence by virtue of their canonical status.Similarly,the four rewriters and Dickens are in a confrontational dialogue.On the one hand,they inherit Dickens's unique writing techniques,and on the other hand,they transcend Dickens's British-identity-based story structure,thus highlighting the importance of their own national identity.In line of this enquiry,the dissertation demonstrates that contemporary Australian writers,through narrating their special national history,attempt to uncover the British-identity-based story structure in Dickens's works and that they have transformed the memory of Dickens,his oeuvre,and the Victorian society presented in his novels and have built the unique historical and cultural memory of Australia so as to reconstruct their own national identity.Although they are all under the rubric of Dickensian rewriting.these four novels tell history of different groups of Australia and explore the relationship between these groups and the Australian identity.Jack Maggs and Magwitch focus on the transported convicts' experiences in Australian and their role in shaping white Australian identity.Wanting and The Bluebird Cafe,respectively presenting the tragic situation of Aboriginal people during the colonial period and the commercialization of Aboriginal history and culture in postcolonial era.touch upon the relationship between the Aborigine and Australian identity.Specifically.In Jack Maggs,Carey regards the male transported convicts like Magwitch(renamed Maggs in the novel)as Australia's founding father.However,the story's London-based structure,Maggs's strong identification with British identity and the inheritance of Australian culture to British culture reflected in the novel indicate that white Australian identity cannot break away from British influence.The white-male-dominated Australian identity that Carey constructs in Jack Maggs is ambivalent.Different from the male convict myth in Jack Maggs.Noonan's Magwitch foregrounds the role played by women(including female convicts and currency lasses)in economic development and mind building of the penal colony,showing that they have also made a significant contribution to the white Australian identity.Jack Maggs and Magwitch are concerned with the marginalized convicts in Dickens's novel.whereas Flanagan's Wanting places the Aborigines-the absent group in Dickens's oeuvre-at the center of the text.It depicts Aborigines'colonized history and their unique culture,criticizes Britain's occupation and cultural oppression of the Aborigines and stresses the fact that Aboriginal history and culture are an indispensable part of Australian identity.Bird's The Bluebird Cafe also attends to Aboriginal history and culture.Different from Wanting,it presents the preservation of Aborigine's culture and their history from colonized period to contemporary era in museums owned by whites.In other words,since the colonized period.Aborigines have never had the power to represent their own history and culture.They are not only excluded from the Australian national identity.but also deprived of their distinctive ethnic and cultural identity.Through rewriting Dickens's works and biographies.the four contemporary Australian novelists present the history of convicts transported to Australia and that of Australian Aborigines.build unique historical and cultural memory of Australia and construct the Australian identity in which transported convicts and Aborigines are the main bod.