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Brings French colonial literature into a common context with that from Virginia and New England colonies

Algonquin and Iroquois natives of the American Northeast were described in great detail by colonial explorers who ventured into the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beginning ...

Brings French colonial literature into a common context with that from Virginia and New England colonies

Algonquin and Iroquois natives of the American Northeast were described in great detail by colonial explorers who ventured into the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beginning with the writings of John Smith and Samuel de Champlain, Gordon Sayre analyzes French and English accounts of Native Americans to reveal the rhetorical codes by which their cultures were represented and the influence that these images of Indians had on colonial and modern American society. By emphasizing the work of Pierre Francois-Xavier Charlevoix, Joseph-Francois Lafitau, and Baron de Lahontan, among others, Sayre highlights the important contribution that French explorers and ethnographers made to colonial literature.

Sayre's interdisciplinary approach draws on anthropology, cultural studies, and literary methodologies. He cautions against dismissing these colonial texts as purveyors of ethnocentric stereotypes, asserting that they offer insights into Native American cultures. Furthermore, early accounts of American Indians reveal Europeans' serious examination of their own customs and values: Sayre demonstrates how encounters with natives' wampum belts, tattoos, and pelt garments, for example, forced colonists to question the nature of money, writing, and clothing; and how the Indians' techniques of warfare and practice of adopting prisoners led to new concepts of cultural identity and inspired key themes in the European enlightenment and American individualism.

A comprehensive historical and theoretical study of the "creolization" process and its relevance to both colonial and postcolonial literatures, this book focuses for the most part on novels from or about the French Caribbean.

It examines the ways in which colonial authors such as Bernardin de ...

A comprehensive historical and theoretical study of the "creolization" process and its relevance to both colonial and postcolonial literatures, this book focuses for the most part on novels from or about the French Caribbean.

It examines the ways in which colonial authors such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Victor Hugo, as well as such contemporary writers as Edouard Glissant and Daniel Maximin, have represented the process of cultural mixing and (con)fusion to which, under a variety of names (creolization, hybridity, metissage), postcolonial theorists have increasingly turned in order to understand the complexities of cultural identity in today's transnational world. Notwithstanding the obvious differences separating colonial and postcolonial literatures, Islands and Exiles emphasizes their entanglements, mapping out a middle ground in which they are ambivalently linked to one another.

An introductory section shows how colonial and postcolonial literatures are joined in a relation of epistemic complicity that the author designates with the word "post/colonial". That relation is exemplified by the intertextual links binding together Daniel Defoe's colonial classic Robinson Crusoe and J. M. Coetzee's postcolonial rewriting of it, Foe.

Subsequent chapters include an analysis of the central text of Enlightenment exoticism, Bernardin's Paul et Virginie; overviews of Glissant's novels as well as his theoretical discussions of creolization; an examination of fictional representations of the Haitian revolution (such as Hugo's Bug-Jargal and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!); and an extended consideration of nineteenth-century Martiniquan literature and politics.

The bookconcludes with a reading of New Zealander Keri Hulmes's the bone people, in which the author summarizes his core argument: namely, that in discussions of cultural identity, we need to maintain a fine balance between promoting the hy

`The contact with . . .primitive nature and primitive man brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart.' (Joseph Conrad) `Flowers look loveliest in their native soil . . .plucked, they fade, And lose the colours Nature on them laid.' (Toru Dutt) This is the first anthology to gather together ...

`The contact with . . .primitive nature and primitive man brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart.' (Joseph Conrad) `Flowers look loveliest in their native soil . . .plucked, they fade, And lose the colours Nature on them laid.' (Toru Dutt) This is the first anthology to gather together British imperial writing alongside native and settler literature in English, interweaving short stories, poems, essays, travel writing, and memoirs from the phase of British expansionist imperialism known as high empire. A rich and starling diversity of responses to the colonial experience emerges: voices of imperial; adventurers, administrators, memsahibs, propagandists and poets intermingle with West Indian and South African nationalists, Indian mystics, Creole balladeers, women activists and native interpreters. Drawn from India, Africa, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, and Britain, this wide-ranging selection reveals the vivid contrasts and subtle shifts in responses to colonial experience, and embraces some of empire's key symbols and emblematic moments. Comprehensive notes and full biographies ensure that this is one of the most compelling, readable and academically valuable source books on the period.