Kirjahaku

The author of such works as A Brighter Sun (1952), The Lonely Londoners (1956), and The Plains of Caroni (1970), West Indian novelist Samuel Selvon is attracting growing amounts of scholarly attention. Nonetheless, criticism of his works has largely been imbalanced, with most scholarship focusing primarily on his language. This book corrects that imbalance by placing Selvon's novels within historical, sociological, and ideological contexts. A new interpretation of Selvon's achievement as a novelist, the volume looks, for the first time, at his works in terms of categories of novels--peasant, middle-class, and immigrant.The book demonstrates that each category is different from the others, and that novels within categories are similar. Thus it provides a coherent vision of Selvon's canon. It illustrates, as well, the development of Selvon's philosophy of West Indians as peasant, bourgeois, and immigrant. In doing so, it explores the significance of ethnicity in his works and discusses Selvon's imaginative apotheosis of the Indo-Trinidadian peasant and the diminution of the Afro-Trinidadian immigrant. The volume also studies Selvon's fictional and rhetorical techniques and argues that his works range from Bildungsroman to picaresque to epic to satire.

The first full-length study of Selvon that covers all aspects of his fictional world – poems, radio dramas, short fiction, and novels. It shows the evolution of Selvon as fledging author of poems and short fiction to an established short-story writer and novelist. It argues that Selvon enjoys a special niche in West Indian literature because of his celebration of the enormous struggle of the Indo-Trinidadian peasant out of the cane experience into every professional field and politics, of the glamorization of the West Indian immigrant (The Lonely Londoners), and of his daring use of the linguistic continuum of his island, establishing it as a dialect that meets every exigency of his artistry. He is the most democratic and predictive of Trinidadian writers, establishing the unlimited literary potential of the ordinary man and anticipating concerns of politicians, linguists, and artists.