• animal magnetism
• Australian criminal heritage
• Great Expectations
• writing back

Peter Carey’s writing back of "Great Expectations" (1860-1861), "Jack Maggs" (1997), revolves around the concept of “convict” in Dickens' works. Nowadays as well as in the past, the representation of the first Australian settlers as criminals still burdens the construction of their descendants’ identity. Therefore, this thesis aims at highlighting the strategies through which the contemporary author discards the “convict stain” stereotype.
Rather than limiting his rereading to a specific novel, Carey's masterpiece centres on the eighteenth-century author, pointing to Dickens not only as to the great novelist and journalist – that-is-to-say as to the designated voice of Victorian values –, but as to the mingling of art, life, and mesmerism from which the clash of the Self against the Other stems.
Due to the nature of the topic, the method followed takes into account both historiographical research and postcolonial theory in Chapter one, whereas the psychoanalytic approach is integrated in Chapter two. Chapter three focuses on the birth and development of animal magnetism, laying emphasis on the Dickens' appropriation of Mesmer's doctrine. Ultimately, Chapter four proceeds into the close reading of "Jack Maggs", since text analysis alone can reveal the very meaning of the convict's return from the penal colony.