Jack Maggs is Peter Carey's Wide Sargasso Sea, a postcolonial retaliation that rewrites a canonical text from the English literary tradition. Jean Rhys's novel gives voice to the silenced marginal figure of the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre; Carey's allows the transported convict Magwitch from Dickens's Great Expectations to take centre stage and tell his story from his own point of view. Whereas Rhys's heroine writes back against the male character who dominated her in Charlotte Brontë's original story, Carey's hero audaciously rewrites his own fictional creator, the novelist himself. As usual Carey crosses genre boundaries to create a distinctive narrative hybrid: historical fiction, which he exploited so vividly in Oscar and Lucinda, adopts here the mantle of Australian convict literature in the tradition of Marcus Clarke's classic His Natural Life (1885) and...
1911 words
Citation: Woodcock, Bruce. "Jack Maggs". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 June 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4368, accessed 09 June 2026.]
