Edouard Glissant

Edouard Glissant is an accomplished and influential novelist and poet, and has recently emerged as a major theorist in Caribbean studies and post-colonial literature. In this first full-length study of Glissant’s creative and theoretical work J. Michael Dash examines his poems, novels, plays and essays in the context of modern French literary movements and the post-negritude Caribbean situation, providing both a useful introduction to, and a challenging assessment of, Glissant’s work to date. Dash shows how Glissant has focused in an unprecedented way on the Caribbean in terms of the diverse and hybrid culture that has been created in the region, and how his ideas on a cross-cultural politics are the shaping force in the francophone Caribbean ‘Creolite’ movement.

• First full-length study of major Caribbean writer • Full chronological analysis of Glissant’s creative and theoretical work to date • Major addition to CUP’s unique Studies in African and Caribbean Literature series

1. Contexts; 2. The poetic intention: Un champ d’îles, La terre inquiète, Les Indes, Soleil de la conscience; 3. Novels of time and space: La lézarde, Le quatrième siècle; 4. Writing the ‘real country’: L’intention poétique, Malemort, Boises, Monsieur Toussaint; 5. Towards a theory of Antillanité: La case du commandeur, Le discours antillais; 6. A poetics of chaos: Pays rêvé, pays réel, Mahagony, Poétique de la relation.