Writing Back to the Canon: Some Re-writings of Great Expectations

The demise of colonial empires during the twentieth century and the construction of new cultural identity in the former colonies has brought to a whole body of literary texts that belong to the field known as “new literatures in English”. These literatures give voice to the marginalised Other and challenge the so called ‘mainstream’ culture by undermining the alleged European cultural superiority. One of the strategies used to question the European domination is rewriting and subverting the master narratives that convey imperial ideologies through the creation of a ‘counter-discourse’ that unveils the assumptions of the Western literary canon. The hegemonic boundaries are dismantled and the imperial privilege of the ‘centre’ is hence subverted in favour of the ‘periphery’, that was marginalised and silenced during colonisation. The re-reading and the rewriting of colonial literature provide a counterbalance to European assumptions, hence the voices of the denigrated inferior characters, as well as their points of view are restored, and the perspective of the oppressed is made evident. While voicing the Other, the re-writing of canonical novels inevitably works in the field of intertextuality, as the texts are in a constructive dialogue with each other. The following thesis investigates the ways in which postcolonial and postmodern authors have rewritten a foundational Victorian novel, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, by showing the possibility of another side to the story. The representation of the convict Magwitch and of the oppressed girl at Satis House provide the starting point for a re-reading and a re-writing of the text. Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip, Michael Noonan’s Magwitch, Gail Jones’s Sixty Lights, Sue Roe’s Estella: Her Expectations and Alanna Knight’s Estella negotiate with the Dickensian novel and give either Magwitch or Estella, who are marginalised and silenced, a chance to speak.