Copyright © 2026 Authors retain the copyright of this article. This article is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
@article{193207,
author = {Shelsiya R and Dr. Lavanya S},
title = {Constructions, Contestations, And Postcolonial Masculinity in Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs},
journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
year = {},
volume = {12},
number = {no},
pages = {27-30},
issn = {2349-6002},
url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=193207},
abstract = {This paper interrogates the constructions and contestations of masculinity within the postcolonial framework of Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), a revisionist reimagining of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861). By displacing the narrative centre to the Australian convict-turned gentleman, Carey deconstructs imperial hierarchies of gender, class, and morality, situating masculine identity at the interstice of colonial trauma and self-fashioning. The novel’s protagonist embodies a hybrid masculinity one shaped by exile, servitude, and the spectral presence of the British patriarchal order while simultaneously engaging in a performative negotiation of power, desire, and belonging. Through a postcolonial lens, the study explores how Carey reconfigures the colonial male subject as both agent and artifact of empire, revealing the anxieties underlying the metropolitan ideal of manhood. The analysis mobilizes theoretical insights from postcolonial theory, gender studies, and psychoanalytic criticism to expose how Jack Maggs destabilizes the binaries of master/servant, colonizer/colonized, and civilized/savage. Ultimately, Carey’s narrative articulates a counter-discourse of masculinity that resists imperial inscription, foregrounding the fractured, performative, and contingent nature of male identity in postcolonial modernity.},
keywords = {Postcolonial Masculinity, Hybridity, Gender Identity, Colonial Discourse, Power.},
month = {},
}
Cite This Article
Submit your research paper and those of your network (friends, colleagues, or peers) through your IPN account, and receive 800 INR for each paper that gets published.
Join NowNational Conference on Sustainable Engineering and Management - 2024 Last Date: 15th March 2024
Submit inquiry