• Mir Mahammad Ali

Close scrutiny of 19th-century Victorian literature shows that novels are the most predominant genre of literature in this period. Writers like Dickens and others attempt to deal with Victorian realism in their novels. By portraying characters like David Copperfield, Oliver Twists, Pip, and others, Dickens attempts to present a replica of Victorian society in his novels. The hue and cry of London Street are evident in Dickens’s presentation of slum landlordism, child labour, pickpocketing, rape, prostitution, murder, criminality, convictism, and moral and social degeneration, which starkly contrasts with the myth of Victorian progress. But his characters are presented as possessing typical English moral standards despite their impoverished state of belonging to the lower stratum of society. One such Dickensian character is Pip from Great Expectations. However, with the advent of postmodernism in the 20th century, Dickens’s novels are re-examined as repositories of various kinds of Victorian grand narratives. In the post-war intellectual climate of rewriting the Victorian classics, Dickens’s Great Expectations is being rewritten by a host of writers. One such prominent rewriting comes from the Australian writer Peter Carey whose Jack Maggs rewrites Dickens’s classic novel Great Expectations from a revisionary perspective. Thus, this paper aims to make a comparative analysis of Carey’s Jack Maggs as a rewriting of Dickens’s Great Expectations from a postmodern perspective. This paper will examine Carey’s act of rewriting Dickens’s Victorian classic based on Lyotard’s theory of postmodernism, which emphasizes dismantling the grand narratives through little narratives in the post-war period. The paper will also attempt to show how Dickens’s English convict, Abel Magwitch, who had been deported to Australia for his criminal offenses in England, appears as Jack Maggs in Carey’s novel to reclaim his English identity. He ascertains his Australianness when he is denied his English identity. Finally, the paper explores how postmodernism allows Carey to rewrite Dickens’s classic with the employment of two postmodern techniques, ‘metafiction’ and ‘parody.’

Victorian, Realism, Rewriting, Postmodern, English, Australian, Identity, Metafiction, Parody

"ENGLISH VS. AUSSIE STORY: JACK MAGGS AS A POSTMODERN REWRITING OF DICKENS’S GREAT EXPECTATIONS", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 9, page no.a384-a388, September-2022, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2209037.pdf

"ENGLISH VS. AUSSIE STORY: JACK MAGGS AS A POSTMODERN REWRITING OF DICKENS’S GREAT EXPECTATIONS", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.9, Issue 9, page no. ppa384-a388, September-2022, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2209037.pdf