Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780}}}1870 [Hardcover]

Examines the interrelationship between Caribbean narratives and British fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Combines literary criticism and historical analysis, examining a wide range of sources to rescue the stories of ordinary black Jamaicans and traveling African Americans from historical obscurity. At the same time, the book uses canonical fiction to show how crucial Caribbean culture was in the development of British fiction.Combines literary criticism and historical analysis, examining a wide range of sources to rescue the stories of ordinary black Jamaicans and traveling African Americans from historical obscurity. At the same time, the book uses canonical fiction to show how crucial Caribbean culture was in the development of British fiction.Tim Watson challenges the idea that Caribbean colonies in the nineteenth century were outposts of empire easily relegated to the realm of tropical romance while the real story took place in Britain. Analyzing pamphlets, newspapers, estate papers, trial transcripts, and missionary correspondence, this book recovers stories of ordinary West Indians, enslaved and free, as they made places for themselves in the empire and the Atlantic world, from the time of sugar tycoon Simon Taylor to the perspective of Samuel Ringgold Ward, African American eyewitness to the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. With readings of Maria Edgeworth and George Eliot, the book argues that the Caribbean occupied a prominent place in the development of English realism. ?However, Watson shows too that we must sometimes turn to imperial romance - which made protagonists of rebels and religious leaders, as in Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827) - to understand the realities of Caribbean cultural life.Introduction: Realism and romance in the nineteenth-century Caribbean; 1. Creole realism and metropolitan humanitarianism; 2. Caribbean romance and subaltern history; 3. 'This fruitful matrix of curses': the interesting narrative of the life of Samuel Ringglc9