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Modernity and the novel in the expanded Caribbean : Wilson Harris, Patrick Chamoiseau and Carlos Fuentes

My thesis examines how the form of the novel is transformed in the postcolonial/neo-imperial context of the 20th century Expanded Caribbean. I focus on works written in Spanish, English and French and thus privilege a regional approach over a linguistic one. While the fragmentation of the region has been furthered historically through the educational system, neo-imperialism, economics and global politics, the region is united by the common experience of colonialism, of plantation slavery and/or the encomienda system, and of anti-imperial resistance. By focusing on the form of the novel that has originated in Europe, I set out to examine the impact of geo-politics and economics on aesthetics. Furthermore, Carlos Fuentes, Wilson Harris and Patrick Chamoiseau can arguably be seen as representative for the academic fields of Latin Americanism, Postcolonial Studies and Francophone Literature respectively, given their canonical status within them. One of the aims of this thesis is to examine how the novels from the Expanded Caribbean speak back to certain developments within the 'central' academies over the last few decades and what the canonization of certain writers to the exclusion of others, and the promotion of certain ways of reading texts, tell us about the latter. For this reason, most of the novels examined in this thesis have been published during the last quarter of the century that, on the political, economic and social level, has witnessed dramatic global changes that have had a devastating impact on the achievements of the 'boom' period of the sixties.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:502528
Date January 2007
CreatorsOloff, Kerstin Dagmar
PublisherUniversity of Warwick
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3707/

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