Washed by the Gulf Stream: The Historic and Geographic Relation of Irish and Caribbean Literature - Hardcover

McGarrity, Maria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 087413028X ISBN 13: 9780874130287

Publisher: University of Delaware Press, 2009

Synopsis

This is an historically comparative postcolonial study asserting the dialogic relation between Irish and Caribbean narrative form, relating Irish Big House and Caribbean Plantation novels, the 'errantry' of Jocye's and Walcott's epic geographies, and the transition from traditional bildrungsroman modes of exile to contemporary memoirs of 'diseased' emigration. The book focuses on the demise of empire and the role of geography in creating an 'island imaginary' for writers from James Joyce and Jean Rhys to Jamaica Kincaid and Frank McCourt.The complex interplay of cultures that makes up both Ireland and the Caribbean, the islands they inhabit both literally and metaphorically, ensures that neither peoples nor cultures exist in anything less than a 'meta-archipelago'. The links in these chains of islands and peoples, dispersed geographically, economically, and politically connect strongly, not simply throughout the North Atlantic but throughout the larger diasporic world. Maria McGarrity is an associate professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York.

About this title

Review

The book is a pleasure to read and full of fresh details. Year's Work in English Studies

About the Author

Maria McGarrity is an associate professor of English at Long Island University.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 087413028X
• ISBN 13: 9780874130287
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200