Nobody's nation : reading Derek Walcott / Paul Breslin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Breslin, Paul.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Walcott, Derek--Knowledge--History.

Walcott, Derek.

Decolonization in literature.

Literature and history--West Indies--History--20th century.

Literature and history.

Postcolonialism--West Indies.

Postcolonialism.

West Indies--In literature.

West Indies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (345 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Nobody's Nation offers an illuminating look at the St. Lucian, Nobel-Prize-winning writer, Derek Walcott, and grounds his work firmly in the context of West Indian history. Paul Breslin argues that Walcott's poems and plays are bound up with an effort to re-imagine West Indian society since its emergence from colonial rule, its ill-fated attempt at political unity, and its subsequent dispersal into tiny nation-states. According to Breslin, Walcott's work is centrally concerned with the West Indies' imputed absence from history and lack of cohesive national identity or cultural tradition. Walcott sees this lack not as impoverishment but as an open space for creation. In his poems and plays, West Indian history becomes a realm of necessity, something to be confronted, contested, and remade through literature. What is most vexed and inspired in Walcott's work can be traced to this quixotic struggle. Linking extensive archival research and new interviews with Walcott himself to detailed critical readings of major works, Nobody's Nation will take its place as the definitive study of the poet.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

1. Biographical Sketch

2. "Fishing the Twilight for Alternate Voices": The Early Poems and Henri Christophe

3. The Young Playwright in Jamaica

4. Adam's Amnesia: The Uses of Memory and Forgetting

5. Dead Ends and Green Beginnings: Dream on Monkey Mountain

6. Another Life: West Indian Experience and the Problems of Narration

7. "Pulling in the Seine / of the Dark Sea": "The Schooner Flight"

8. Derek Sans Terre: The Poetry of the 1980's

9. Epic Amnesia: Healing and Memory in Omeros

10. Post-Homeric Derek: The Bounty and Tiepolo's Hound

Epilogue: Toward a Just Evaluation of Walcott

NOTES

INDEX

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 297-322) and index.

ISBN:

9786612069628

9781282069626

1282069624

9780226074283

0226074285

OCLC:

646808783