Rewriting Strategy And Thematic Significance In Jack Maggs

This study explores the parodic intertextuality in Peter Carey's Jack Maggs,a revisionary rewriting of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.Arguing against the general assumption that Jack Maggs is a postcolonial counter-writing of Great Expectations,the thesis contends that Carey's re-vision re-imagines the literary and historical relationship of Australia to Britain.revealing its cultural memory of being an undesirable colony for the disposal of convicts.His writing levels some undisguised critique of the imperial bildungsroman in Dickens' text,replacing Jack Maggs as an Australian gentleman in the colonny.Meanwhile.Carey's text generates dialogism with its pretext,which in turn.engages the reader into an act of cross reading that is both intertextual and historical.The thesis approaches this convoluted rewriting from three aspects.Firstly,by parodying Dickens's plot of returned convict.Carey develops Magwitch's story into a national allegory of Australia.With a reversed point of view from Jack Maggs,Carey reevaluates Dickens's fabrication of English identity along the subplot revolving round Magwitch.Secondly,Carey portraits a serial of female characters which constitute parodic caricatures of "angel in the house" in the Victorian ideology,providing an inter-textual space to reflect the gender stereotypes that participate in the construction of Englishness.Thirdly,through the invention of a self-made writer Tobias Oats,whose life trajectory parodies Charles Dickens's biography,Carey exposes the irony of social mobility within the Victorian self-help culture.Moreover,the dynamic relations among Tobias's criminal novel of Jack Maggs,Jack Maggs's private letters,and Carey's fictional account of Jack Maggs not only reveals the imperial construction of Australia in Dickens's writing,but also conveys a skepticism towards any totalizing narrative of the Australian convict past.