AustLit

'Drawing on recent work on settler colonialism, which emphasizes the ambivalence with which settler societies negotiated the complex ties between metropole and colony, this essay examines how such ambivalence is played out on multiple levels in Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, his postcolonial response to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. This occurs both through the process of simultaneous resistance and accommodation that happens as Jack Maggs and Tobias Oates struggle for ownership of Maggs' story, which breaches the gap between England and Australia, and through the analogous process whereby Carey comes to terms with Dickens' depiction of Australia's ancestral history and offers his own re-interpretation of this classic story. Domesticity plays a crucial role in these complex negotiations because it is through an understanding of what "home" means that Jack Maggs—and by extension Carey—learn to disavow aspects of their English inheritance while reconciling other parts as integral to a uniquely Australian identity' (Author's abstract).