Comparative Study of the Themes in Great Expectations and Shuggie Bain

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative literary analysis of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
and Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain through Marxist and psychoanalytic theoretical lenses.
Despite the century-wide gap and divergent settings—Victorian England and 1980s postindustrial Scotland—both novels share striking thematic resonances in their portrayals of
poverty, class (im)mobility, familial dysfunction, and identity formation. The study employs
close reading and critical theory to examine how each protagonist – Pip and Shuggie –
navigates harsh socio-economic realities and internal turmoil shaped by their environments.