Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction

Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction PDF Author: Barbara J. Webb
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
At a time of growing interest in postcolonial writing, this volume offers a comparative study of three major Caribbean novelists: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant. Despite differences of language and background, these writers from Cuba, Guyana and Martinique have much in common. Each has written extensively on the shared heritage of the peoples of the Caribbean and each has been influential in redefining the poetics of the novel in the context of New World culture.

Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction

Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction PDF Author: Barbara J. Webb
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
At a time of growing interest in postcolonial writing, this volume offers a comparative study of three major Caribbean novelists: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant. Despite differences of language and background, these writers from Cuba, Guyana and Martinique have much in common. Each has written extensively on the shared heritage of the peoples of the Caribbean and each has been influential in redefining the poetics of the novel in the context of New World culture.

Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction

Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction PDF Author: Barbara J. Webb
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
At a time of growing interest in postcolonial writing, this volume offers a comparative study of three major Caribbean novelists: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant. Despite differences of language and background, these writers from Cuba, Guyana and Martinique have much in common. Each has written extensively on the shared heritage of the peoples of the Caribbean and each has been influential in redefining the poetics of the novel in the context of New World culture.

Myths and Realities of Caribbean History

Myths and Realities of Caribbean History PDF Author: Basil A. Reid
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817355340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This book seeks to debunk eleven popular and prevalent myths about Caribbean history. Using archaeological evidence, it corrects many previous misconceptions promulgated by history books and oral tradition as they specifically relate to the pre-Colonial and European-contact periods. It informs popular audiences, as well as scholars, about the current state of archaeological/historical research in the Caribbean Basin and asserts the value of that research in fostering a better understanding of the region’s past. Contrary to popular belief, the history of the Caribbean did not begin with the arrival of Europeans in 1492. It actually started 7,000 years ago with the infusion of Archaic groups from South America and the successive migrations of other peoples from Central America for about 2,000 years thereafter. In addition to discussing this rich cultural diversity of the Antillean past, Myths and Realities of Caribbean History debates the misuse of terms such as “Arawak” and “Ciboneys,” and the validity of Carib cannibalism allegations.

C. L. R. James and Creolization

C. L. R. James and Creolization PDF Author: Nicole King
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604736011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
C. L. R. James (1901–1989), one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century, expressed his postcolonial and socialist philosophies in fiction, speeches, essays, and book-length scholarly discourses. However, the majority of academic attention given to James keeps the diverse mediums of James's writing separate, focuses on his work as a political theorist, and subordinates his role as a fiction writer. This book, however, seeks to change such an approach to studying James. Defining creolization as a process by which European, African, Amerindian, Asian, and American cultures are amalgamated to form new hybrid identities and cultures, Nicole King uses this process as a means to understanding James's work and life. She argues that, throughout his career, whether writing a short story or a political history, James articulated his attempt to produce revolutionary, radical discourses with a consistent methodology. James, a Trinidad-born scholar who migrated to England and then to the United States and who described himself both as a black radical and a Victorian intellectual, serves as a definitive model of creolization. King argues that James's writings also fit the model of creolization, for each is influenced by diverse types of discourses. James rarely wrote from within the confines of a single discipline, instead choosing to make the layers of history, literature, philosophy, and political theory coalesce in order to make his point. As his West Indian and Western European influences converge in his work and life, he creates texts that are difficult to confine to a specific category or discipline. No matter which writerly medium he uses, James was preoccupied with how to represent the individual personality and at the same time represent the community. The C. L. R. James that emerges from King's study is a man made more compelling and more human because of his complicated, multilayered, and sometimes contradictory allegiances.

Literature, Modernism and Myth

Literature, Modernism and Myth PDF Author: Michael Bell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521580161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
The use of myth in Modernist literature is a misleadingly familiar theme. Joyce's appropriation of Homer's Odyssey and Eliot's of Frazer's Golden Bough are, like Lawrence's primitivism or Yeats's nationalist folklore, attempts to discover an underlying metaphysic in an increasingly fragmented world. In Literature, Modernism and Myth Michael Bell also examines the relationship of myth and modernism to postmodernism. Myth, Bell shows, is inherently flexible; it was used to justify Pound's totalizing vision of society which eventually descended into fascism, and the liberal, ironic vision of human existence Joyce and Mann expressed. Those theorists who present myth as another form of mystification, a search for false origins, ignore its use by modernists to emphasise the ultimate contingency of all values. This anti-foundational element, Bell claims, enables myth to act as a corrective to the claims of ideological critique. Bell shows how postmodern concerns with political and social responsibility, and the role literature plays in formulating this, have in fact been inherited from modernism.

Memory and Myth

Memory and Myth PDF Author: Fiona Darroch
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 904202576X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This book investigates the problematical historical location of the term 'religion' and examines how this location has affected the analytical reading of postcolonial fiction and poetry. The adoption of the term 'religion' outside of a Western Enlightenment and Christian context should therefore be treated with caution. Within postcolonial literary criticism, there has been either a silencing of the category as a result of this caution or an uncritical and essentializing adoption of the term 'religion'. It is argued in the present study that a vital aspect of how writers articulate their histories of colonial contact, migration, slavery, and the re-forging of identities in the wake of these histories is illuminated by the classificatory term 'religion'. Aspects of postcolonial theory and Religious Studies theory are combined to provide fresh insights into the literature, thereby expanding the field of postcolonial literary criticism. The way in which writers 'remember' history through writing is central to the way in which 'religion' is theorized and articulated; the act of remembrance can be persuasively interpreted in terms of 'religion'. The title 'Memory and Myth' therefore refers to both the syncretic mythology of Guyana, and the key themes in a new critical understanding of 'religion'. Particular attention is devoted to Wilson Harris's novel Jonestown, alongside theoretical and historical material on the actual Jonestown tragedy; to the mesmerizing effect of the Anancy tales on contemporary writers, particularly the poet John Agard; and to the work of the Indo-Guyanese writer David Dabydeen and his elusive character Manu.

Fred D'Aguiar and Caribbean Literature

Fred D'Aguiar and Caribbean Literature PDF Author: Leo Courbot
Publisher: Brill
ISBN: 9789004391642
Category : Caribbean literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
With Fred D'Aguiar and Caribbean Literature: Metaphor, Myth, Memory, Leo Courbot offers the first research monograph entirely dedicated to a comprehensive reading of the verse and prose works of Fred D'Aguiar, prized American author of Anglo-Guyanese origin. "Postcolonial" criticism, when related to the history of the African diaspora, regularly inscribes itself in the wake of Sartrean philosophy. However, Fred D'Aguiar's both typical and untypical Caribbean background, in addition to the singularity of his diction, call for a different approach, which Leo Courbot convincingly carries out by reading literature in the light of Jacques Derrida and Édouard Glissant's less conventional sense of the intrinsically metaphorical and cross-cultural nature of language.

Africana

Africana PDF Author: Anthony Appiah
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195170555
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 3951

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Book Description
Ninety years after W.E.B. Du Bois first articulated the need for "the equivalent of a black Encyclopedia Britannica," Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., realized his vision by publishing Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience in 1999. This new, greatly expanded edition of the original work broadens the foundation provided by Africana. Including more than one million new words, Africana has been completely updated and revised. New entries on African kingdoms have been added, bibliographies now accompany most articles, and the encyclopedia's coverage of the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean has been expanded, transforming the set into the most authoritative research and scholarly reference set on the African experience ever created. More than 4,000 articles cover prominent individuals, events, trends, places, political movements, art forms, business and trade, religion, ethnic groups, organizations and countries on both sides of the Atlantic. African American history and culture in the present-day United States receive a strong emphasis, but African American history and culture throughout the rest of the Americas and their origins in African itself have an equally strong presence. The articles that make up Africana cover subjects ranging from affirmative action to zydeco and span over four million years from the earlies-known hominids, to Sean "Diddy" Combs. With entries ranging from the African ethnic groups to members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Africana, Second Edition, conveys the history and scope of cultural expression of people of African descent with unprecedented depth.

New World Myth

New World Myth PDF Author: Marie Vautier
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773516697
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
In this comparative study of six Canadian novels Marie Vautier examines reworkings of myth in the postcolonial context. While myths are frequently used in literature as transhistorical master narratives, she argues that these novels destabilize the traditional function of myth in their self-conscious reexamination of historical events from a postcolonial perspective. Through detailed readings of François Barcelo's La Tribu, George Bowering's Burning Water, Jacques Godbout's Les Têtes à Papineau, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Jovette Marchessault's Comme une enfant de la terre, and Rudy Wiebe's The Scorched-Wood People, Vautier situates New World myth within the broader contexts of political history and of classical, biblical, and historical myths.

The Luxury of Nationalist Despair

The Luxury of Nationalist Despair PDF Author: A. J. Simoes da Silva
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042014312
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This book offers a timely critique of the work of the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, examining the ways in which his novels exhibit the "luxury of nationalist despair" and exploring the tensions between his strongly voiced anti-colonialism and his ambiguously articulated politics of self. Although stressing the place occupied by Lamming and his work in the context of an anti-colonial first generation of 'nation-writing' that has emerged in the formerly colonized world over the past half-century, the study also addresses the novelist's problematic, reductive focus on a nationalist project that is ultimately deeply flawed - in essence, the result of an uneasy relationship between form and thesis. Lamming's continued struggle with the novel as a genre, especially with its ability to get beyond the cultural and political baggage of colonialism, demonstrates the power of one of his most poignant assertions: "the colonial experience [...] is a continuing psychic experience that has to be dealt with long after the actual situation formally 'ends'." Written from a postcolonial perspective, the study draws also on contemporary feminist criticism in order to examine Lamming's characteristically simplistic depiction of female characters in terms of a greater willingness to embody the neocolonial. The book starts by addressing the place Lamming's work occupies both within postcolonial writing at large and specifically within Caribbean literature. Subsequent chapters provide close textual readings of Lamming's six novels, paired in terms of their foregrounding of issues of race, gender and class. Despite a clear shift in Lamming's thematic focus on the rewriting of Caliban's project, with his last novel offering a basis for a re-imagining of the post/colonial encounter, there remains a perturbing inability to relinquish the privileged stance afforded the postcolonial intellectual in self-imposed exile (cultural, much more than geographical). The book represents an important contribution to criticism on the work of one of the most influential voices in postcolonial literature of the last fifty years.