1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature

Edited By Michael A. Bucknor, Alison Donnell Copyright 2011
    704 Pages
    by Routledge

    704 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction PART I CARIBBEAN POETICS 1. Dionne Brand and a Poetics of Diasporic Domestic Radicalism - ALEXIS GUMBS 2. Kamau Brathwaite: Grounded in the Past, Revisioning the Present - ELAINE SAVORY 3. Erna Brodber and a Poetics of Redemption - ANTONIA MACDONALD 4. Michelle Cliff: The Unheard Music - ISABEL HOVING 5. Understanding the Language of the Imagination: The Fiction of Wilson Harris MARK MCWATT 6. C.L.R. James’s Twentieth Century Literary Journeys - AARON KAMUGISHA 7. The Revolutionary Poetics of George Lamming - SANDRA POUCHET PAQUET 8. The Poetics and Politics of Earl Lovelace's Fiction - JOHN THIEME 9. V.S. Naipaul: Writer as Critic - NICHOLAS LAUGHLIN 10. The Dignity of the Examined Life: The Biographical Slant in Caryl Phillips’s Writing - BÉNÉDICTE LEDENT 11. This Space/Dis/Place Between: The Poetics and Philosophy of Body, Voice and Silence in the Work of Marlene NourbeSe Philip - CURDELLA FORBES 12. "The Voice from the Bottom of the Well": Olive Senior’s ‘Grung’/Ground(ed) Poetics - MICHAEL A. BUCKNOR 13. Derek Walcott: on Being A Caribbean Poet - EDWARD BAUGH 14. Insurgent Criticism: Sylvia Wynter’s Poetics of Disenchantment - NORVAL EDWARD PART II CRITICAL GENERATIONS 15. The Foundational Generation of Postcolonial Caribbean Critics: From The Beacon to Savacou - NORVAL EDWARDS 16. The Questioning Generation: Rights, Representations and Cultural Fractions in the 1980s and 90s - ALISON DONNELL 17. The Eclectic Generation: Caribbean Literary Criticism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century - NADIA ELLIS PART III TEXTUAL TURNING POINTS 18. Early Colonial Narratives of the West Indies: Lady Nugent, Eliza Fenwick, Matthew Lewis and Frieda Cassin - EVELYN O’CALLAGHAN 19. The Urban-Rural Dialectic and the Changing Role of Black Women: Jane’s Career, Banana Bottom, Minty Alley & Pocomania - BELINDA EDMONDSON 20. "so differently from what the heart arranged": Voices Under the Window, New Day, A Quality of Violence - VICTOR CHANG 21. Caribbean Ecopoetics: Dwellings in In the Castle of My Skin, Palace of the Peacock & A House for Mr Biswas’ - SUPRIYA NAIR 22. Prophetic Visions of the Past: The Arrivants and Another Life - LORNA BURNS 23. Race, Diaspora, and Identity: The Meeting Point, Brown Girl, Brownstones, and The Lonely Londoners - HYACINTH M. SIMPSON 24. Wordy, Worldly Women Poets: Louise Bennett, Lorna Goodison and Olive Senior - DENISE DeCAIRES NARAIN 25. Writing Gender, Re-writing Nation: Wide Sargasso Sea, Annie John, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, and Myal - REBECCA ASHWORTH 26. "Fi wi story": Moments in the Emergence of a Caribbean Theatre We Can Own: Man Better Man, Pantomime, Lionheart Gal - CAROLYN ALLEN 27. ‘From diasporic sensibility to close transnationalism: The Agüero Sisters, The Dew Breaker and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - KEZIA PAGE 28. Rewriting the Mother/Nation: No Telephone to Heaven, In Another Place, Not Here & Cereus Blooms at Night - EMILY TAYLOR PART IV LITERARY GENRES AND CRITICAL APPROACHES 29. "No Nation Now but the Imagination": Migration and Diaspora in Contemporary Caribbean Literature - DAVID CHARIANDY 30. Dub Poetry - MICHAEL A. BUCKNOR 31. Ecocriticism: the politics of place - ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY 32. Beyond the Boundaries: Caribbean Life-Writing and Performative Liberation - LISA R. BROWN 33. Marxism: Reading Class in Anglophone Caribbean Literature - GLYNE A. GRIFFITH 34. Anglophone Caribbean and Modernism - J. DILLON BROWN 35. Splitting the Difference: Hybridity and Subalternity in the Postcolonial Caribbean - LINCOLN Z. SHLENSKY 36. Psychoanalysis in Caribbean Literature - WHITNEY BLY EDWARDS 37. Queer theory and Caribbean Writing - RONALD CUMMINGS 38. Strategies of Caribbean feminism - DONETTE FRANCIS PART V CARIBBEAN LITERATURE & … 39. The Canon /Canonicity a. Anglophone Caribbean Literature and the Canon - LEAH ROSENBERG b. Canons, Curriculums and Critics - KENNETH RAMCHAND 40. Ethnicity a. Authorial Reckoning with the Dougla in Trinidad Literature, 1929-1997 - SHEILA RAMPERSAD b. Chinese Characters in Anglo-Caribbean Literature - ANN-MARIE LEE-LOY 41. Folk a. "Folking up the Criticism": The Politics of "the Folk" in Caribbean Discourse - CHRISTIAN CAMPBELL b. The Folk in Caribbean Theatre - LOUIS REGIS 42. Gender/Sexuality a. Caribbean Literature and Sexuality - FAITH SMITH b. Male Same-Sex Relationality as Critical Trauma: Un-Knowing the Language of Heteronormative Dominance in Anglo-Caribbean Gender Discourse - CHARLESTON THOMAS 43. History a. The lives of others: happenings, histories and literary healing - ALISON DONNELL b. Re-membering History: The Aesthetics of Ruins in West Indian Postcolonial Poetry - DANIA DWYER 44. Indigeneity a. There Once was an Indian Woman Who Imagined Elsewhere and Others - TANYA SHIELDS b. Recognizing the Spirit: indigenous spirituality and Caribbean literature - KEI MILLER 45. Language a. Language and the Downpressed: The Rasta Man in Jamaican Creative Writing - VELMA POLLARD b. Language Use and West Indian Literary Criticism - MERLE HODGE 46. Location a. The Language of Landscape: A Lexicon of the Caribbean Spatial Imaginary - SARAH CASTEEL b. Memory-Work, Field-Work: Reading Merle Collins and The Poetics of Place - SHALINI PURI 47. Migration a. "Tom Say" Returns and Redirections in Caribbean Diaspora Literary Politics - RINALDO WALCOTT b. Triply Diasporized:" Literary Pathways of Caribbean Migration and Diaspora - CAROLE BOYCE-DAVIES 48. Nation a. At the Border—What Remains, Abides: Fragmentation, Nation and the Arrivant - ANTHONY REED b. Rewriting the Caribbean Nation: from Fictional to Diasporic - MARIKA PREZIUSO 49. Popular a. What is the "popular" in Caribbean Popular Culture?: Notes Towards a Response - PATRICIA J. SAUNDERS b. Killing Talk: Postmodernism and the Popular--Violence and Jamaican Dancehall Music - IDARA HIPPOLYTE 50. Race a. Black Radical Thought - ELDON V. BIRTHWRIGHT b. The Divisions that Bind: Thinking through race in Anglophone Caribbean Literature - JEAN ANTOINE-DUNNE PART VI DISSEMINATION & MATERIAL TEXTUALITY 51. Anthologizing the Caribbean - ERIKA J. WATERS 52. Political Tensions and Caribbean Voices: the Swanzy Years, 1946-1954 - PHILIP NANTON 53. "Look, we movin now": the Interface between Film and Literature - JEAN ANTOINE-DUNNE 54. Ways of Seeing: Visual/Verbal Expressions – Caribbean Writers Who Paint - KIM ROBINSON-WALCOTT 55. The Idea of the Literary in the Little Magazines of the 1940s -RAPHAEL DALLEO 56. Local and Metropolitan Publishing - GAIL LOW 57. New Media and Digital Archives - ANNIE PAUL

    Biography

    Michael A. Bucknor is a lecturer at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. He is an editor of the Journal of West Indian Literature and has published book chapters and journal articles on Caribbean and Canadian Literature, diasporic writing, body theory, masculinities, cultural and performance studies.

    Alison Donnell is Reader at the University of Reading. She is author of Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature (Routledge, 2006); editor of Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture (Routledge, 2002) and co-editor of The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (1996).

    'An elegantly comprehensive survey of the terrain and an invaluable resource for teachers, students and writers.' - Caryl Phillips

    '[The editors] provide an admirable contribution to Caribbean literary studies specifically and world literary studies as a whole.' - Choice