AbstractCharles Dickens’s Great Expectations opens with a jolt, as Abel Magwitch – an escaped convict – pounces on the narrator and protagonist, Pip. Despite this rather dramatic introduction, and the pivotal role that he goes on to play in the plot, Magwitch has never been given the sustained critical analysis that he warrants. More often than not he has been treated as one of Dickens’s infamous ‘flat’ characters; a kind of ‘pantomime wicked uncle’, in the words of George Orwell. This is a critical legacy that this paper seeks to redress. Seeing Magwitch as an essential element in Dickens’s critique of mid nineteenth-century society, this paper examines Magwitch’s largely ignored peripatetic and homeless past. By contextualizing Magwitch in his role as a vagrant outsider, and then exploring how this marginal position nuances the cannibalistic appetite he displays in the first pages of the novel, I argue that Magwitch’s violence and ‘savagery’ forms a foil for the more sadistic practices of civilized soci...

中文翻译：

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流浪者、罪犯、食人族首领：亚伯·马格维奇和寄予厚望的食人文化

摘要查尔斯·狄更斯的《远大前程》以一个惊心动魄的开头，因为逃犯阿贝尔·马格维奇扑向叙述者和主角皮普。尽管有这个相当戏剧性的介绍，以及他在情节中继续扮演的关键角色，但马格威奇从未得到过他所保证的持续批判性分析。他经常被视为狄更斯臭名昭著的“扁平化”人物之一。用乔治奥威尔的话来说，是一种“哑剧邪恶的叔叔”。这是本文试图纠正的重要遗产。将马格威奇视为狄更斯对 19 世纪中叶社会批判的一个基本要素，本文考察了马格威奇在很大程度上被忽视的游荡和无家可归的过去。通过将 Magwitch 作为一个流浪的局外人的角色背景化，