Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women's Writing and Decolonization FROM THE PUBLISHER
In Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts, Kathleen J. Renk demonstrates how contemporary Anglophone Caribbean women's writing radically subverts the powerful myth of the family as it is constructed in nineteenth-century British and colonial texts. Reading the fiction of Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand, Jean Rhys, Erna Brodber, and Michelle Cliff alongside British texts such as Dickens's Great Expectations and Bronte's Jane Eyre, she argues that Anglophone Caribbean women writers create new narratives that simultaneously "bury" Victorian ghosts--the discourse on the Victorian mother, the plantation family discourse, and the discourse on madness--and "catch" Caribbean shadows--the histories of forgotten or elided Caribbean ancestors and narratives of resistance.
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
Kathleen Renk's careful documentation of the connections between Anglophone Caribbean women's texts and Victorian discourses on hierarchy, family, and race make this book essential reading for scholars of Caribbean literature in general, and Caribbean women's writing in particular. — Kathleen M. Balutansky
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