AustLit

'...Magwitch madness...has been inspired by Derrida's notion of 'archive fever' - the 'compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin' (Derrida, 1998, p. 9). Like the convict Magwitch in Charles Dickens's novel, who is relocated to Australia, but remains imaginatively and materially linked to the centre of the Empire through his patronage of the boy Philip Pirrip (Pip), contemporary manifestations of Magwitch madness, whether they be in curriculum documents, media debates, text selection or pedagogical practices, are distinguished by a nostalgia for classic texts...and metaphorical and virtual proximity to the cultural capital that these classic works represent. ...

In this chapter, I will examine some contemporary manifestation of Magwitch madness in Some Australasian texts set for study in senior English. Thorough this analysis, I will pursue the connection between these texts and a more systemic manifestation of this condition in the recent debate around the teaching of Australian literature and in the Australian Curriculum: English. In the final section of this chapter, I will explore the implications of Magwitch madness for classroom practice, by drawing on data collected in four diverse Victorian secondary schools in 2010 as part of the project National Stories: Teaching Australian Literature in Secondary English. Through the examination of these various and inter-connected expressions of antipodean archive fever in text, curriculum and practice, this chapter will map some of the complexities and challenges of teaching Australian literature in twenty-first century classrooms.' (From author's introduction, 130, 131-132)