Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere

From the Plantation to the Postcolonial

Raphael Dalleo

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780813931999
• eBook ISBN: 9780813932026
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing together the most exciting recent archival work in anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone Caribbean studies, Raphael Dalleo constructs a new literary history of the region that is both comprehensive and innovative. He examines how changes in political, economic, and social structures have produced different sets of possibilities for writers to imagine their relationship to the institutions of the public sphere. In the process, he provides a new context for rereading such major writers as Mary Seacole, José Martí, Jacques Roumain, Claude McKay, Marie Chauvet, and George Lamming, while also drawing lesser-known figures into the story. Dalleo's comparative approach will be important to Caribbeanists from all of the region's linguistic traditions, and his book contributes even more broadly to debates in Latin American and postcolonial studies about postmodernity and globalization.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Periodizing the Public Sphere
• Part One: The Rise of the Caribbean Literary Public Sphere, 1804 to 1886
• Part Two: Modern Colonialism and the Anticolonial Public Sphere, 1886 to 1959
• Part Three: Postcoloniality and the Crisis of the Literary Public Sphere, 1959 to 1983
• Conclusion: The Postcolonial Public Sphere
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index