Jack Maggs Research Paper
AUTHORSHIP AND CULTURAL REVISIONISM IN
PETER CAREY’S JACK MAGGS
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO DICKEN 'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS
نشر بمجلة كليات الآداب بجامعة السابع من إبريل-العدد الاول يناير2005-بالجماهيرية العربية الليبية الشعبية الإشتراكية العظمى –تأليف دكتور عبدالمجيد محمد خالد
Dr. Abd-El-Mageed Mohamed Khaled
Peter Carey’s engagement with Charles Dickens and Great Expectations in Jack Maggs (1997 bespeaks a contemporary sensibility, postmodern and postcolonial alike, that aligns it with recent revisions of canonical European texts by writers from the former British colonies in the period since 1945. One such text that …show more content…
The letters fail, however, to move the young gentleman, who instead perceives them as “harbingers of destruction,” a threat to his comfortable life. As it soon becomes clear, Phipps has no wish to meet Maggs, except to murder him in order to secure the house in Great Queen Street the latter provisioned from afar. Weak, callous, and snobbish, Phipps eludes his benefactor’s pursuit, just as the latter’s dream of an idealized England becomes more and more …show more content…
He carries with him the framed portrait of the four-year old boy who has kept him alive for the past twenty-five years. Through Phipps, Maggs lives out a compensatory and empowering dream on which he will not give up: “I am his da. He is my son. I will not abandon him” (264). This moving speech points, albeit obliquely, to the “Australian anxiety” that Peter Pierce explores in his book The Country of Lost Children, where he puts forth the “shocking”notion that “Australia is the place where the innocent young are most especially in jeopardy.Standing for boys and girls of European origin who strayed into the Australian bush, the lost child is an arresting figure in the history and the folklore of colonial Australia” (xi). Granted, Phipps has never been to Australia, but, as Pierce contends, the abiding force of the figure of the lost child has “deeper and darker origins and implications,” standing for the generation of its parents, representing the anxieties of European settlers because of the ties with home which they have severed upon their arrival in Australia
PETER CAREY’S JACK MAGGS
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO DICKEN 'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS
نشر بمجلة كليات الآداب بجامعة السابع من إبريل-العدد الاول يناير2005-بالجماهيرية العربية الليبية الشعبية الإشتراكية العظمى –تأليف دكتور عبدالمجيد محمد خالد
Dr. Abd-El-Mageed Mohamed Khaled
Peter Carey’s engagement with Charles Dickens and Great Expectations in Jack Maggs (1997 bespeaks a contemporary sensibility, postmodern and postcolonial alike, that aligns it with recent revisions of canonical European texts by writers from the former British colonies in the period since 1945. One such text that …show more content…
The letters fail, however, to move the young gentleman, who instead perceives them as “harbingers of destruction,” a threat to his comfortable life. As it soon becomes clear, Phipps has no wish to meet Maggs, except to murder him in order to secure the house in Great Queen Street the latter provisioned from afar. Weak, callous, and snobbish, Phipps eludes his benefactor’s pursuit, just as the latter’s dream of an idealized England becomes more and more …show more content…
He carries with him the framed portrait of the four-year old boy who has kept him alive for the past twenty-five years. Through Phipps, Maggs lives out a compensatory and empowering dream on which he will not give up: “I am his da. He is my son. I will not abandon him” (264). This moving speech points, albeit obliquely, to the “Australian anxiety” that Peter Pierce explores in his book The Country of Lost Children, where he puts forth the “shocking”notion that “Australia is the place where the innocent young are most especially in jeopardy.Standing for boys and girls of European origin who strayed into the Australian bush, the lost child is an arresting figure in the history and the folklore of colonial Australia” (xi). Granted, Phipps has never been to Australia, but, as Pierce contends, the abiding force of the figure of the lost child has “deeper and darker origins and implications,” standing for the generation of its parents, representing the anxieties of European settlers because of the ties with home which they have severed upon their arrival in Australia