Colonial Expansion And Colonialism In Peter Austen's Great Expectations

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Peter Carey is a leading figure in the literary world, contemporary Australia Australian novels regarded as a writer with international color who finally make Australia free from the narrow localism of stubborn corner to a new universality. His novels reverberate through the echoes of history, melting black humor, allegorical novels and science fiction in a furnace that highlights the idiosyncrasies of fantasy and reality. Carey's Australia in 19th century was not a desolate, barren and terrifying criminal exile, but a vibrant, hopeful place.
Jack Maggs (1997) is the rewriting of Great Expectations (1861) by Peter Carey. Great Expectations, one of the representative works of the classical British realism in 19th century, not only vividly portrays hardship to pursue great expectations by the people at the bottom of the country, represented by Pip, the main character in Great Expectations, but also objectively reflects the historical background of the colonial expansion and social isolation. Based on the narrative perspective and the imperial thinking in the text of Dickens’s novel, Peter …show more content…

As an exiled man to Australia from England, through their own hard work, he set up his own business in Australia, but deep inside, he has been to the British cultural identity, wanted to return home with honor, which was totally controlled by the middle class on behalf of the empire of cold and cruelty. At this point, we can see Great Expectations and Jack Maggs have strong intertextuality, the former walk through Dicken’s colonialism thought, while the latter reflects Carey post-colonial history, namely, reviewed and corrected by the colonists’ distorted history and culture. All in all, postcolonial narratology is the product of both Peter Carey.'s style consciousness and the specific cultural context with narrative

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