Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. “Madness Is Rampant on This Island”: Writing Altered States in Anglophone Caribbean Literature

   • Bénédicte Ledent, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Daria Tunca

   Pages 1-17

3. “Kingston Full of Them”: Madwomen at the Crossroads

   • Kelly Baker Josephs

   Pages 19-38

4. “Fighting Mad to Tell Her Story”: Madness, Rage, and Literary Self-Making in Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid

   • Denise deCaires Narain

   Pages 39-62

5. Madness and Silence in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and In the Falling Snow

   • Ping Su

   Pages 63-80

6. Speaking of Madness in the First Person/Speaking Madness in the Second Person? Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and “The Cheater’s Guide to Love”

   • Delphine Munos

   Pages 81-102

7. What Is “Worse Besides”? An Ecocritical Reading of Madness in Caribbean Literature

   • Carine M. Mardorossian

   Pages 103-115

8. Performing Delusional Evil: Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

   • Rebecca Romdhani

   Pages 117-135

9. Horizons of Desire in Caribbean Queer Speculative Fiction: Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil

   • Michael A. Bucknor

   Pages 137-160

10. When Seeing Is Believing: Enduring Injustice in Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting

    • Alison Donnell

    Pages 161-179

11. Migrant Madness or Poetics of Spirit? Teaching Fiction by Erna Brodber and Kei Miller

    • Evelyn O’Callaghan

    Pages 181-202

12. (Re)Locating Madness and Prophesy: An Interview with Kei Miller

    • Rebecca Romdhani

    Pages 203-212

13. Back Matter

    Pages 213-220

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This collection takes as its starting point the ubiquitous representation of various forms of mental illness, breakdown and psychopathology in Caribbean writing, and the fact that this topic has been relatively neglected in criticism, especially in Anglophone texts, apart from the scholarship devoted to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The contributions to this volume demonstrate that much remains to be done in rethinking the trope of “madness” across Caribbean literature by local and diaspora writers. This book asks how focusing on literary manifestations of apparent mental aberration can extend our understanding of Caribbean narrative and culture, and can help us to interrogate the norms that have been used to categorize art from the region, as well as the boundaries between notions of rationality, transcendence and insanity across cultures. 







                          

• Mental illness
• Trauma
• Madness
• Neurosis
• Colonization
• Diaspora
• Caryl Phillips
• Class
• Gender
• Junot Díaz
• Ecocriticism
• Jamaica Kincaid
• Colonial
• Marlon James
• Kei Miller
• Merle Collins

• University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

  Bénédicte Ledent, Daria Tunca

• University of the West Indies, Bridgetown, Barbados

  Evelyn O'Callaghan

Bénédicte Ledent is Professor in the English Department of the University of Liège, Belgium.

Evelyn O’Callaghan is Professor of West Indian Literature at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. 

Daria Tunca is Lecturer in the English Department of the University of Liège, Belgium.






                            
 

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