'Read together or as stand-alone pieces, the thirteen poems offered below are conceived as a creative-critical response to two novels, a Victorian one, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), and its neo-Victorian counterpart, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997). Rather than simply inspired by these novels, the poems are the result of a critical reading of both Carey’s reimagining of Dickens’s great English novel and the source text itself. As such they implicitly engage with Carey’s critics, who have almost unanimously analysed Jack Maggs from a postcolonial perspective, thereby largely ignoring the rewriting of the women characters. Scholars have systematically pointed out how Dickens’s orphan Pip is rewritten by Carey as Henry Phipps, the Australian convict Abel Magwitch as Jack Maggs and Dickens himself as the great Victorian author Tobias Oates. Together with the annotations in part II, the poems offer a creative contribution to the critical engagement with Carey’s novel, by arguing that Carey’s Mercy, servant and mistress of would-be gentleman Percy Buckle in Jack Maggs, can be fruitfully read as a re-imagining of Dickens’s Molly, biological mother of Estella and housekeeper of unscrupulous lawyer Jaggers in Great Expectations. The poems raise questions concerning neo-Victorianism, patriarchal discourse and trauma theory from a feminist perspective.' (Publication abstract)
'This paper explores poetry as a means of augmenting cross-cultural connections; we maintain that the genre is inherently humanistic, and that connecting with poets abroad and at large can be generative, exploratory, and invested in locating traits amid our differences that ulitmately draw us closer toward renewed ethical engagements. In a world that seems increasingly distracted by noise (often produced willfully, it seems, to ideological intent), poetry remains yet a means of intervening, interfering with, and interrupting the myopias of narrowed accounts of self, and self in relation to others. We argue that poetry can continue to make uncommonly useful contributions towards a common humanity: as our numerous inter-cultural projects demonstrate, to think poetically and connectively is to work non-reductively, in resonant ways that can shift us beyond the quotidian, into the boundlessly possible.' (Publication abstract)
