ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature offers a comprehensive, critically engaging overview of this increasingly significant body of work.

The volume is divided into six sections that consider:

  • the foremost figures of the Anglophone Caribbean literary tradition and a history of literary critical debate
  • textual turning points, identifying key moments in both literary and critical history and bringing lesser known works into context
  • fresh perspectives on enduring and contentious critical issues including the canon, nation, race, gender, popular culture and migration
  • new directions for literary criticism and theory, such as eco-criticism, psychoanalysis and queer studies
  • the material dissemination of Anglophone Caribbean literature and generic interfaces with film and visual art

This volume is an essential text that brings together sixty-nine entries from scholars across three generations of Caribbean literary studies, ranging from foundational critical voices to emergent scholars in the field.

The volume's reach of subject and clarity of writing provide an excellent resource and springboard to further research for those working in literature and cultural studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies as well as Caribbean studies, history and geography.

part |108 pages

Caribbean Poetics

chapter |8 pages

Dionne Brand

A Poetics of Diasporic Domestic Radicalism

chapter |9 pages

Kamau Brathwaite

Grounded in the Past, Revisioning the Present

chapter |7 pages

Erna Brodber

A Poetics of Redemption

chapter |7 pages

Michelle Cliff

The Unheard Music

chapter |9 pages

Wilson Harris

Understanding the Language of the Imagination

chapter |7 pages

C.L.R. James

Twentieth-Century Literary Journeys

chapter |7 pages

George Lamming

Revolutionary Poetics

chapter |6 pages

Earl Lovelace

The Poetics and Politics of his Fiction

chapter |9 pages

V.S. Naipaul

The Writer as the Last Free Man

chapter |6 pages

Caryl Phillips

The Dignity of the Examined Life

chapter |7 pages

Marlene Nourbese Philip

This Space/Dis/Place Between: The Poetics and Philosophy of Body, Voice and Silence

chapter |8 pages

Olive Senior

‘Grung'/ground(ed) Poetics: ‘The Voice from the Bottom of the Well’

chapter |6 pages

Derek Walcott

On Being a Caribbean Poet

chapter |10 pages

Sylvia Wynter

Insurgent Criticism and a Poetics of Disenchantment

part |38 pages

Critical Generations

chapter |13 pages

The Foundational Generation

From The Beacon to Savacou

chapter |12 pages

The Questioning Generation

Rights, Representations and Cultural Fractions in the 1980s and 1990s

chapter |11 pages

The Eclectic Generation

Caribbean Literary Criticism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

part |96 pages

Textual Turning Points

chapter |8 pages

Early Colonial Narratives of the West Indies

Lady Nugent, Eliza Fenwick, Matthew Lewis and Frieda Cassin

chapter |8 pages

The Urban–Rural Dialectic and the Changing Role of Black Women

Jane's Career, Banana Bottom, Minty Alley and Pocomania

chapter |8 pages

‘So Differently from what the Heart Arranged'

Voices Under the Window, New Day and A Quality of Violence

chapter |8 pages

Caribbean Ecopoetics

Dwellings in In the Castle of My Skin, Palace of the Peacock and A House for Mr Biswas

chapter |10 pages

Prophetic Visions of the Past

The Arrivants and Another Life

chapter |8 pages

Race, Diaspora and Identity

The Meeting Point, Brown Girl, Brownstones and The Lonely Londoners

chapter |10 pages

Wordy, Worldly Women Poets

Louise Bennett, Lorna Goodison and Olive Senior

chapter |9 pages

Writing Gender, Re-Writing Nation

Wide Sargasso Sea, Annie John, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home and Myal

chapter |8 pages

‘Fi Wi Story': Moments in the Emergence of a Caribbean Theatre we Can Own

Man Better Man, Pantomime and Lionheart Gal

chapter |8 pages

From Diasporic Sensibility to Close Transnationalism

The Agüero Sisters, The Dew Breaker and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

chapter |9 pages

Rewriting the Mother/Nation

No Telephone to Heaven, In Another Place, Not Here and Cereus Blooms at Night

part |101 pages

Literary Genres and Critical Approaches

chapter |10 pages

Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary Caribbean Literature

‘No Nation Now but the Imagination'

chapter |10 pages

Dub Poetry as a Postmodern Art Form

Self-conscious of Critical Reception

chapter |11 pages

Ecocriticism

The Politics of Place

chapter |10 pages

Marxism

Reading Class in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

part |227 pages

Caribbean Literature and …

chapter |10 pages

Folk (a) ‘Folking up the Criticism'

The Politics of ‘the Folk' in Caribbean Discourse

chapter |10 pages

(b) Male Same-Sex Relationality as Critical Trauma

Un-Knowing the Language of Heteronormative Dominance in Anglo-Caribbean Gender Discourse

chapter |10 pages

History (a) The Lives of Others

Happenings, Histories and Literary Healing

chapter |9 pages

(b) Re-membering History

The Aesthetics of Ruins in West Indian Postcolonial Poetry

chapter |10 pages

(b) Recognizing the Spirit

Indigenous Spirituality and Caribbean Literature

chapter |10 pages

Language (a) Language and the Downpressed

The Rasta Man in Jamaican Creative Writing

chapter |10 pages

Location (a) The Language of Landscape

A Lexicon of the Caribbean Spatial Imaginary

chapter |9 pages

(b) Memory-Work, Field-Work

Reading Merle Collins and the Poetics of Place

chapter |9 pages

(b) ‘Triply Diasporized'

Literary Pathways of Caribbean Migration and Diaspora

chapter |9 pages

Nation (a) At the Border – What Remains, Abides

Fragmentation, Nation and the Arrivant

chapter |8 pages

(b) Rewriting the Caribbean Nation

Literary Authorship and the Diasporic Imagination

chapter |10 pages

(b) Killing Talk

Postmodernism and the Popular – Violence and Jamaican Dancehall Music

chapter |9 pages

(b) The Divisions that Bind

Thinking Through Race in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

part |63 pages

Dissemination and Material Textuality

chapter |6 pages

Political Tensions and Caribbean Voices

The Swanzy Years, 1946–1954

chapter |8 pages

‘Look, we Movin Now'

The Interface between Film and Literature

chapter |10 pages

Ways of Seeing

Visual/Verbal Expressions – Caribbean Writers Who Paint

chapter |10 pages

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