Introduction: Caribbean postscripting of the British canon / Giselle Rampaul and Barbara Lalla -- Dickens and others : metastance and re-membering / Barbara Lalla -- "How blest am I ... !" : colonial desire in selected poetry by John Donne / Giselle Rampaul -- Recovering naton, recovering woman : Shakespeare's Cressida and the imperial attic / Genevieve Rugh Phagoo -- Far-off places and the invention of Englishness : rereading Robinson Crusoe as romance / Rhonda Kareen Harrison -- Froude, Kingsley and Trollope : wandering eyes in a Trinidadian landscape / Jak Peake -- A study of the imperial gaze : Jenkin's Lutchmee and Dilloo : a study of West Indian life / J. Vijay Maharaj -- Strange creatures and fantastic worlds : the other in selected nineteenth-century children's texts / Giselle Rampaul.
Summary:
"By adopting a Caribbean perspective through which to re-examine seventeenth- to nineteenth- century texts from the British canon, this collection of essays uncovers the ways in which the literature produced at the height of British imperialism was used to consolidate and validate the national identity of the colonizer, and to justify political and cultural domination of Other places like the Caribbean. The contributors critique a wide range of verse and prose from the works of Shakespeare, Donne, Defoe, Austen, Brontèˆ, Froude, Kingsley, Trollope, Jenkins, Stevenson, Barrie, Carroll and Dickens, revealing a literature that was very much a product of its time, but that was also responsible for contemporary and later conceptions of the Caribbean and other outposts of empire"--Back cover.
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