Most critical analyses of humor in postcolonial literary settings have focused on its power to critique and subvert dominant hegemonic systems in ways that tend to divide participants according to predictable dichotomies. Yet humor theorists have long recognized laughter's equivalent potential as a bonding mechanism. An examination of the rhetorical functions of humor in Andrea Levy'sSmall Islandreveals the extent to which these affiliative forms of humor can be successfully deployed across cultural divides within a migrant context, as well as the risks and limitations inherent to such an approach. Ultimately, the novel's gentle, inviting, and accessible humor provides the basis for a convincing, character-driven appeal to reduce racial prejudice.

Through the critical discourse analysis of Anglophone Caribbean literature as a polyrhythmic performance, this research sets out to examine the claim that, in a world in a state of constant flux, emerging Caribbean voices are offering a challenging perspective on how to negotiate identity away from the binary constructs of centre and margin. It argues that the Caribbean writer, as a self-conscious producer of alternative discourses, offers an innovative and transcultural vision of the self. This research consists of three stages which integrate critical discourse and literary analysis with colonial/postcolonial and socio-cultural theories. Firstly, it investigates the power of language as an operation of discourse through which to apprehend reality within a binary system of representation. It then examines how the concept of discourse, as a site of contestation and meaning, enables the elaboration of a Caribbean counter-discourse. Finally, it explores the role, within the Caribbean text, of literary techniques such as narrative fragmentation, irony, dialogism, intertextuality, ambivalence and the carnivalesque to challenge, disrupt the established order and offer new perspectives of being. My study of Anglophone Caribbean texts highlights the power of language and the authority of the ‘book’ as subtle, insidious tools of domination and colonisation. It also demonstrates how, by allowing hitherto marginalised voices to write themselves into being, Caribbean writers enable linear narratives and monolithic visions of reality to be contested and other perspectives of understanding and of meaning to be uncovered. It exposes the plurality and the interweaving of discourses in the Caribbean text as a liberating, dynamic force which enables new subject positions and realities to emerge along the lines of similarity and difference. At a time when the issue of identity is one of the central problems in the world today, the research argues that this celebration of the plural, the fluid and the ambivalent offers new ways of being away from the stultifying perspective of essentialist forms.

The diploma thesis is concerned with the portrayal of the Windrush generation, the first wave of immigrants coming to Britain from its former colonies, in Andrea Levy's Small Island (2004) and Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956). The theoretical part of the thesis outlines the socio-historical and cultural overview of the rising immigration to Britain after the Second World War, which according to the selected secondary sources contributed to the increase of racism and discrimination, namely against people of Caribbean origin. The thesis further presents principal concepts of postcolonial and Anglophone Caribbean literature and examines both authors' personal experience with immigration as well as the idiosyncratic features of their writing. These are essential for understanding the literary works of the selected authors and the subsequent interpretation of their literary depiction of the immigrant experience. The practical part of the thesis relies on the theoretical part and focuses on the comparison of the two novels, their presentation and view of the so-called Windrush generation with specific attention paid to their form and content. Simultaneously, the work examines how the literary depictions of the immigrant experience correspond to the theory presented. Moreover, the thesis...