Cirrus@Austlit

'[...]Peter Widdowson argues that Jack Maggs, along with a number of other counterdiscursive novels, are books that "almost invariably have a clear cultural-political thrust": " That is why the majority of them align themselves with feminist and/or postcolonialist criticism in demanding that past texts' complicity in oppression . . . be revised and re-visioned as part of the process of restoring a voice, a history and an identity to those hitherto re-visionary fiction exploited, marginalized and silenced by dominant interests and ideologies" (505-6). Because of the novel's overt generic subversiveness and its direct engagement with Victorian literature, it is not a surprise that Jack Maggs has been viewed as a predictable category through this kind of reductive and self-affirming lens more than most of Carey's other novels have. Savery was married in England and had a son named Henry, who, like his namesake Maggs's adopted son, would have been twenty-one years old in 1837. [...]of the only three copies left of the original manuscripts of Saver y's Quintos Servinton, one is held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, where Maggs's fictional letters are preserved. [...]it is that language and literature jointly provide political foundations for a nation" (World 34). Schmidt-Haberkamp comments on the usage of the phrase "such is life" by Great Expectations' working-class Joe and Maggs and the way that it reverberates with the nationalist spirit of Joseph Furphy's classic Australian novel Such Is Life: "Containing the fictional diaries of Tom Collins, a former bullocky, the novel in 1897 was offered to The Bulletin for serial publication by its author with the description: 'Temper democratic; bias, offensively Australian'" (258). [...]Jack Maggs is as much a text about Carey as it is about Dickens, Maggs, and Oates and the literary cultures that all of these "authors" dwell in and represent, divided around two literary poles of England and Australia.' (Publication abstract)