Soundings in French Caribbean Writing 1950-2000 The Shock of Space and Time [Hardcover]

Since 1950, French Caribbean writers have attracted international attention to their work and to their lively exploration of the unique circumstances that detonated this literary explosion. This book probes their particularly intense, even fraught sensitivity to space and to time, highlighting the insights that they offer into global issues of distance and displacement, history and memory, and into the possibilities and constraints of writing.

Introduction
1. Theoretical Generations: Writing Identities
2. Novel Time: Reconstructing the Past?
3. The Place of Memory
4. The Time-Space of Writing: Voicing Continuities, Texturing Traditions
5. The Plantation Revisited: a Chronotope Revised
6. The Reproduction of Space? Urban Time
7. French Connection, Metropolitan Mirror
8. A critical space-time: Africa, between authenticity and ambivalence
9. Imagining the Local: Circulating in the New World
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Gallagher has produced a concise, elegantly written study of remarkable range and sophistication.... Students who seek a reliable orientation to the sociohistorical, literary-historical, and theoretical issues involved in recent literature from the francophone Caribbean will not find a better, more reliable introduction.... [It] deserves the attention of specialists and general readers alike. --World Literature Today

In this important study, Gallagher offers a probing and sensitive examination of postcolonial French Caribbean literature.... Gallagher's cogent and intelligent discussion suggests a vitality of spirit reflective of each author's contribution to an authentic literature whose global impact on literary thought extends beyond the borders of the Caribbean. --Choice

Mary Gallagher is Lecturer in French at University College Dublin.