Intertextuality In Charles Dickens 'Great Expectations'

The novel entitled Mister Pip (2006), written by Lloyd Jones, is connected with another classic novel from the Victorian Era: Great Expectations (Charles Dickens, 1861). This last novel is set at a time when British colonizers were seeking to expand their territories, and so, become the most powerful empire on Earth. Mister Pip, on the contrary, represents a new re-colonization carried out by the Australians──also part of the British Empire──but this time, in the 20th century. Jones reinvented a Victorian classic by writing back to European canonical stories, as it is Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. This process of storytelling evolves, passing through different character voices. It moves from Mr Watts, who teaches the village youngsters;

The notion of intertextuality shows how texts are visible within others, and how a text never stands by itself, but it is instead influenced by earlier writings. This is how, through the reading of Great Expectations by Matilda' teacher, she felt identified with Dickens’ character Pip, visible even in the conclusion of Mister Pip, when the girl decides to write her own story, the one which is being delivered to readers. One of our first narrators will be the parents and relatives of Watts' students who, through their stories, try to share their knowledge of the world with their young learners. These narrations can be understood as text themselves, due to their swift between daily life conversation and literary narrations, but this mixing of real fact and historical events has been coined by Linda Hutcheon in her essay Beginning to Theorize the Postmodern (1987) as Historiographic Metafiction. Villagers became narrators of their own beliefs and past experiences, mixed with traces of fictional events, previously acquired by religious beliefs, novels or