An outstanding compilation of over seventy primary and secondary texts of writing from the Caribbean. The editors demonstrate that these singular voices have emerged out of a wealth of literary tradition and not a cultural void.

A historiography of Caribbean literary history and criticism, the author explores different critical approaches and textual peepholes to re-examine the way twentieth-century Caribbean literature in English may be read and understood.

Caribbean poetry written in English has been attracting growing amounts of scholarly attention. The first substantial annotated bibliography of primary and secondary materials related to the topic, this reference chronicles the development of Anglophone Caribbean poetry from 1970 through 2001. Included are nearly 900 entries for anthologies, reference works, conference proceedings, critical studies, interviews, and recorded works. The volume also includes a chronology, an overview of the development and significance of Caribbean poetry in English, and extensive indexes. In 1971 the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies held a conference on West Indian literature at the University of the West Indies. This was the first assembly for the discussion of West Indian literature by West Indian people on West Indian soil. Since then, interest in Caribbean poetry written in English has grown dramatically. Caribbean poetry was influenced by the American Black Power movement during the 1970s, and women poets began to contribute their voices throughout the 1980s. Caribbean poets have, in turn, gained greater access to publishing outlets, resulting in a wider international readership and a corresponding increase in scholarly and critical studies. This book is the first substantial annotated bibliography of primary and secondary materials related to Caribbean poetry written in English. The volume begins with the rise of interest in Anglophone Caribbean poetry in the 1970s and continues through 2001. Included are entries for nearly 900 anthologies, reference works, conference proceedings, critical studies, interviews, and recordings. The entries are grouped in chapters devoted to particular types of works. In addition, the volume includes a chronology, a discussion of the history of Anglophone Caribbean poetry, and extensive indexes.

For the first time the Dutch-speaking regions of the Caribbean and Suriname are brought into fruitful dialogue with another major American literature, that of the anglophone Caribbean. The results are as stimulating as they are unexpected. The editors have coordinated the work of a distinguished international team of specialists. Read separately or as a set of three volumes, the History of Literature in the Caribbean is designed to serve as the primary reference book in this area. The reader can follow the comparative evolution of a literary genre or plot the development of a set of historical problems under the appropriate heading for the English- or Dutch-speaking region. An extensive index to names and dates of authors and significant historical figures completes the volume. The subeditors bring to their respective specialty areas a wealth of Caribbeanist experience. Vera M. Kutzinski is Professor of English, American, and Afro-American Literature at Yale University. Her book Sugar's Secrets: Race and The Erotics of Cuban Nationalism, 1993, treated a crucial subject in the romance of the Caribbean nation. Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger has been very active in Latin American and Caribbean literary criticism for two decades, first at the Free University in Berlin and later at the University of Maryland. The editor of A History of Literature in the Caribbean, A. James Arnold, is Professor of French at the University of Virginia, where he founded the New World Studies graduate program. Over the past twenty years he has been a pioneer in the historical study of the Négritude movement and its successors in the francophone Caribbean.

The articles in this collection are representative of the criticism that has followed Walcott's career from the 1940s into the 1990s. Ten entries by Walcott himself (including one not previously published and two vital interviews) are complemented by some 40 incisive essays and reviews, ranging from professional assessments to the rare, personal observations of Walcott's earliest mentors.

This Companion is divided into six sections that provide an introduction to and critical history of the field, discussions of key texts and a critical debate on major topics such as the nation, race, gender and migration. In the final section contributors examine the material dissemination of Caribbean literature and point towards the new directions that Caribbean literature and criticism are taking.