The novels of Samuel Selvon : a critical study
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The novels of Samuel Selvon : a critical study
（Contributions to the study of world literature, no. 102）
Greenwood Press, 2001
Available at 2 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [167]-170) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction The Peasant Novels A Brighter Sun Turn Again Tiger The Plans of Caroni Those Who Eat the Cascadura The Middle-Class Novels An Island is a World I Hear Thunder The Immigrant Novels The Housing Lark The Lonely Londoners Moses Ascending Moses Migrating Conclusion Bibliography
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