Soundings in French Caribbean Writing 1950-2000: The Shock of Space and Time

by Mary Gallagher

Overview

Since 1950, French Caribbean writers have attracted international attention to their work and to their lively exploration of the unique circumstances that detonated this literary explosion. This book probes their particularly intense, even fraught sensitivity to space and to time, highlighting the insights that they offer into global issues of distance and displacement, history and memory, and into the possibilities and constraints of writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198159827
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/23/2003
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.60(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Mary Gallagher is Lecturer in French at University College Dublin.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Theoretical Generations: Writing Identities2. Novel Time: Reconstructing the Past? 3. The Place of Memory4. The Time-Space of Writing: Voicing Continuities, Texturing Traditions5. The Plantation Revisited: a Chronotope Revised6. The Reproduction of Space? Urban Time7. French Connection, Metropolitan Mirror8. A critical space-time: Africa, between authenticity and ambivalence9. Imagining the Local: Circulating in the New WorldConclusionBibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

"Gallagher has produced a concise, elegantly written study of remarkable range and sophistication.... Students who seek a reliable orientation to the sociohistorical, literary-historical, and theoretical issues involved in recent literature from the francophone Caribbean will not find a better, more reliable introduction.... [It] deserves the attention of specialists and general readers alike."—World Literature Today

"In this important study, Gallagher offers a probing and sensitive examination of postcolonial French Caribbean literature.... Gallagher's cogent and intelligent discussion suggests a vitality of spirit reflective of each author's contribution to an authentic literature whose global impact on literary thought extends beyond the borders of the Caribbean."—Choice

From the Publisher