Description
Book SynopsisThis timely new book skilfully examines the work of the award-winning writer Patrick Chamoiseau. Considered by many as one of the most innovative writers to hit the French literary scene in over 40 years, Chamoiseau made his name with his book Texaco (published in 1992 and winner of the highest literary prize in France, the Prix Goncourt). His books have gone on to sell millions and his work has been translated by a number of academic presses. McCusker sets the author in context, providing a valuable contribution to ‘memory studies’ by looking at literary representation of memory in Martinique, a society founded on slavery but now politically assimilated to the metropolitan centre, France.
Trade Review[This is a study infused with] a highly topical freshness and with an intellectual potency that together make of it a particularly welcome contribution to several fields of criticism: not just Caribbean studies, francophone studies, and postcolonial studies, but also trauma studies and cultural studies more widely [...] A lively, sparkling book; it is salted with apt reference and always as stylistically engaging as it is intellectually stimulating.
Mary Gallagher, International Journal of French StudiesAn assured and subtle critique [...]. McCusker's pleasure in reading Chamoiseau's sumptuous prose is clear even as she acknowledges its paradoxes, exclusions and, more recently, its stylistic longueurs. Her book, perceptive and stimulating, is another sign that postcolonial studies has matured as a critical platform for the study of literature and its contentious contexts.
Patrick Crowley, French StudiesThis well-written book will be a boon to those who teach francophone Caribbean literature, and will help to reactivate the scholarly debate about the significance of the creolite movement. It deserves a wide audience, among both anglophone and francophone readers.
Toby Garfitt, Modern Language Review, 104.2 * Modern Language Review, 104.2 *
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1. Beginnings: The Enigma of Origin
- 2. ‘Une tracée de survie’: Autobiographical Memory
- 3. Memory Re-collected: Witnesses and Words
- 4. Memory Materialized: Traces of the Past
- 5. Flesh Made Word: Traumatic Memory in Biblique des derniers gestes
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
