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The late twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first have seen a number of novels that make prominent use of nineteenth-century (mostly Victorian) settings, customs, and mores but that reconstruct that period with strategies and perspectives that are singularly contemporary. John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, Sarah Waters, Margaret Atwood, Lloyd Jones, and Michel Faber have been among those prominent in this movement, as has Peter Carey in Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Ned Kelly Gang. It is in Jack Maggs, however, that Carey offers one of the most complete and complex excursions in subjecting nineteenth-century characters, themes, fictional structures, and authorial habits of mind to twentieth-century techniques. Although Jack Maggs has drawn considerable critical attention, that attention has not focused upon the ways in which Carey makes postmodern devices thematically functional; nor has there been much concentration upon Carey's revisionistic treatment of Dickens. A partial exception is Ankhi Mukherjee's 2005 essay in Contemporary Literature, which also takes an interest in Dickens's revisions of himself. However, Mukherjee uses Lacanian theory to provide a psychological/philosophical frame within which to see an array of recent adaptations of Great Expectations, and her focus upon that novel, and especially her focus upon Jack Maggs, differs from that of this essay, which will examine the range of Carey's several postmodern strategies, culminating, as his novel does, in post-colonialism.
Postmodern devices abound in Jack Maggs: fabulism, intertextuality, metafiction, pastiche, and, at the last minute, the postcolonial twist. Most prominently, Carey leads us through a deconstruction of Dickens-not so much of Dickens's fiction as of Dickens's apparent intent in some of his fiction. This tactic is more than a strategy in Jack Maggs; it becomes an integral part of both plot and theme.
In a host of ways, Jack Maggs is a showcase of twentieth-century re-doings of nineteenth-century fiction. Intertextuality, for instance, takes on complexity and function, as Carey juggles numerous "texts": Dickens's life is one; his fiction is another; the manner in which he reworks his life in that fiction is yet another. Carey's novel is a conglomerate of these texts, but there are several other texts operating within Jack Maggs: Tobias Oates, the Dickens-like author, is always working on a next novel, and he continually...