Title: Communities in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short stories /
Authors: Evans, Lucy, 1979-
Year: 2014
Subjects: Short stories, Caribbean (English) History and criticism.; Caribbean literature History and criticism.; Communities; Short stories, Caribbean (English); Short Stories, Caribbean (English) History and criticism.; Caribbean fiction (English) History and criticism.; Caribbean fiction (English) History and criticism.; Communities in literature.
Abstract: This book examines the representation of community in contemporary Anglophone Caribbean short stories, focusing on the most recent wave of Anglophone Caribbean short story writers following the genre's revival in the mid-1980s. The first extended study of Caribbean short stories, it presents the phenomenon of interconnected stories as a significant feature of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Anglophone Caribbean literary cultures. Lucy Evans contends that the short story collection and cycle, literary forms regarded by genre theorists as necessarily concerned with representations of community, are particularly appropriate and enabling as a vehicle through which to conceptualise Caribbean communities. The book covers short story collections and cycles by Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, Alecia Mckenzie, Lawrence Scott, Mark McWatt, Robert Antoni and Dionne Brand, and argues that the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers' imagining of communities, which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of community, bringing literary representations of community into dialogue with models of community developed in the field of Caribbean anthropology. The works analysed are set in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana, and in several cases the setting extends to the Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America. Looking in turn at rural, urban, national and global communities, the book draws attention to changing conceptions of community around the turn of the millennium.
Contents: 1. Rural Communities: Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace and the short story form -- Village life in Olive Senior's Summer Lightning and Other Stories -- From country to city in Earl Lovelace's A Brief Conversion and Other Stories -- 2. Urban Communities: Downtown worlds -- Uptown worlds -- Writing Kingston in Kwame Dawes' A Place to Hide and Other Stories and Alecia McKenzie's Satellite City and Other Stories -- 3. National Communities: Fugal voices in Lawrence Scott's Witchbroom -- The journey upriver in Mark McWatt's Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement -- 4. Global Communities: The diasporic family in Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon -- Mobile readerships in Robert Antoni's My Grandmother's Erotic Folktales.