ABSTRACT
If sequels, prequels and coquels have flourished in mainstream literature in the wake of structuralism and its dialogue with the canon, and have taken a new turn with the postmodern challenging of master narratives, such textual experimentations work differently in the so-called ‘postcolonial literatures’. While Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea invented the subaltern subtext of Bertha Mason’s untold narrative, as convincingly argued by Gayatri Spivak in her famous analysis of Rhys’s text in A Critique of Colonial Reason, Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child (2015) strikes another chord. Indeed, Phillips engages with the canon, not only as something that needs to be challenged but also as part of his cultural, intellectual and affective make-up. Phillips’s latest novel revisits a landscape loaded with references to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , his lost child making his novel, technically speaking, a prequel to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights . Focusing on Heathcliff as a child, situating his narrative before – chronologically speaking – Phillips not only symbolically reframes the filiation but also casts new light on Brontë’s work, inscribing meaning into the master narrative.
