Issue Details: First known date: 2005... 2005 The Writing-back Paradigm Revisited : Peter Carey, Jack Maggs, and Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In her reading of the novel, [Schmidt-Haberkamp] shows how in Carey's novel the sequence of original text [Dickens's Great Expectations] and postcolonial reaction to it, which is central to the writing-back paradigm, are inverted' (Introduction to Fabulating Beauty xxxii).

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Fabulating Beauty : Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey Andreas Gaile (editor), Amsterdam New York (City) : Rodopi , 2005 Z1228080 2005 anthology criticism

    'Peter Carey is one of Australia’s finest creative writers, much admired by both literary critics and a worldwide reading public. While academia has been quick to see his fictions as exemplars of postcolonial and postmodern writing strategies, his general readership has been captivated by his deadpan sense of humour, his quirky characters, the outlandish settings and the grotesqueries of his intricate plots. After three decades of prolific writing and multiple award-winning, Carey stands out in the world of Australian letters as designated heir to Patrick White. Fabulating Beauty pays tribute to Carey’s literary achievement. It brings together the voices of many of the most renowned Carey critics in twenty essays(sixteen commissioned especially for this volume), an interview with the author, as well as the most extensive bibliography of Carey criticism to date. The studies represent a wide range of current perspectives on the writer’s fictions. Contributors focus on issues as diverse as the writer’s biography; his use of architectural metaphors; his interrogation of narrative structures such as myths and cultural master-plots; intertextual strategies; concepts of sacredness and references to the Christian tradition; and his strategies of rewriting history. Amidst predictions of the imminent death of ‘postist’ theory, the essays all attest to the ongoing relevance of the critical parameters framed by postmodernism and postcolonialism.'   (Publication summary)

    Amsterdam New York (City) : Rodopi , 2005
    pg. 245-262

Works about this Work

Antipodean Rewritings of Great Expectations : Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997) and Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (2007) Janet Wilson , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Shadow of the Precursor 2012; (p. 220-235)
'Counter-discourse theory urges readings of postcolonial fictions that are renarrativisations of canonical texts of empire in terms of their strategies of resistance. Recent novels by Peter Carey and Lloyd Jones amply acknowledge their debt to their precursor, Charles Dickens Great Expectations, but this chapter argues that the contestatory imperial relationship is overlaid with the equally compelling theme of postcolonial home and belonging. Carey exploits the oppositional "writing back" paradigm; Jones, by contrast, makes veneration of the Dickensian text central to his plot. Both, however, can also be described as diasporic novels in their preoccupation with the colony as home, as their colonial protagonists, after a fraught encounter with their Victorian heritage in the metropolitan centre of London, find their destiny/destination in the "return." Although this diasporic reading reiterates the familiar binaries of metropolitan centre and colonial periphery, it repositions the filial relationship as one of postcolonial habitation and settlement.' (220)
Antipodean Rewritings of Great Expectations : Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997) and Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (2007) Janet Wilson , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Shadow of the Precursor 2012; (p. 220-235)
'Counter-discourse theory urges readings of postcolonial fictions that are renarrativisations of canonical texts of empire in terms of their strategies of resistance. Recent novels by Peter Carey and Lloyd Jones amply acknowledge their debt to their precursor, Charles Dickens Great Expectations, but this chapter argues that the contestatory imperial relationship is overlaid with the equally compelling theme of postcolonial home and belonging. Carey exploits the oppositional "writing back" paradigm; Jones, by contrast, makes veneration of the Dickensian text central to his plot. Both, however, can also be described as diasporic novels in their preoccupation with the colony as home, as their colonial protagonists, after a fraught encounter with their Victorian heritage in the metropolitan centre of London, find their destiny/destination in the "return." Although this diasporic reading reiterates the familiar binaries of metropolitan centre and colonial periphery, it repositions the filial relationship as one of postcolonial habitation and settlement.' (220)
Last amended 6 Nov 2008 16:17:02
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