Seminar 5. Narratives of Identity in Lloyd Jones's "Mister Pip"
1. “Great Expectations” as a Victorian quest for self-identification
- Class and gender identification
- Self-improvement issues
- Family and love
2. Post-Colonial identity in Lloyd Jones’s “Mister Pip”
- Why is it so easy for Matilda to identify herself with Dickens’s hero despite all the cultural differences?
- How is the dichotomy “fiction vs real life” resolved in the novel? What influence does the written word have upon the lives of the characters?
- How do the worlds of white and black people interact? What are the reasons for Matilda’s final decision to come back to Bougainville in the end of the novel?
- Do you agree with the critics blaming Lloyd Jones for Neo-Colonial attitudes presumably expressed in his novel?
3. Postmodern reevaluation of Victorian metanarrative in Lloyd Jones’s “Mister Pip”
- Which Victorian values are being reevaluated in the derivative text, in what way (destruction, deconstruction or reconstruction) and why?