Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream

Nicole N. Aljoe, Brycchan Carey, Thomas W. Krise

Springer, May 4, 2018 - Literary Criticism - 231 pages

The Caribbean has traditionally been understood as a region that did not develop a significant ‘native’ literary culture until the postcolonial period. Indeed, most literary histories of the Caribbean begin with the texts associated with the independence movements of the early twentieth century. However, as recent research has shown, although the printing press did not arrive in the Caribbean until 1718, the roots of Caribbean literary history predate its arrival. This collection contributes to this research by filling a significant gap in literary and historical knowledge with the first collection of essays specifically focused on the literatures of the early Caribbean before 1850.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• Memory Rememory and the Moral Constitution of Caribbean Literary History: 10
• Early Caribbean Evangelical Life Narrative: 37
• The Promise of the Tropics Wealth Illness and African Bodies in Early AngloCaribbean Medical Writing: 60
• Order Disorder and Reorder The Paradox of Creole Representations in Caribbeana 1741: 81
• Testimonies of the Enslaved in the Caribbean Literary History: 107
• Beyond Bonny and Read Blackbeards Bride and Other Women in Caribbean Piracy Narratives: 124
• Early Creole Novels in English Before 1850 Hamel the Obeah Man and Warner Arundell The Adventures of a Creole: 147
• Colonial Vices and Metropolitan Corrections Satire and Slavery in the Early Caribbean: 171
• Finding the Modern in Early Caribbean Literature: 192
• Index: 213

About the author

Nicole N. Aljoe is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Northeastern University, USA. She is co-director of The Early Caribbean Digital Archive and editor of Caribbeana: The Journal of the Early Caribbean Society. Author of Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1836 (Palgrave, 2012), she also co-edited Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (2014).

Brycchan Carey is Professor of English at Northumbria University, UK. He is the author of British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Palgrave, 2005) and From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658–1761 (2012). His edition of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative was published in 2018.

Thomas W. Krise is President Emeritus and Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, USA. A former president of the Early Caribbean Society and the Society of Early Americanists, he is the editor of Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657-1777 (1999).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream; New Caribbean Studies
• Editors: Nicole N. Aljoe, Brycchan Carey, Thomas W. Krise
• Publisher: Springer, 2018
• ISBN: 3319715925, 9783319715926
• Length: 231 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Modern / 18th Century; Literary Criticism / Modern / General; Literary Criticism / Renaissance; Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social; Social Science / General