Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark maps the distinction between the country and the city onto the geopolitical scale of colonial metropole and periphery, where the colonial periphery is the semiotic placeholder for the role that London plays in the previous two chapters as the space that disrupts conventional novelistic poetics. In Anna Morgan, two worlds that do not compute – the financialized metropole of London and the preindustrial periphery – collide and the result is a character that operates according to the logic of affect rather than conventional narratives of sentiment and emotion. Her character thereby anticipates the emergence of affect as value form.

From Chaucer to Shakespeare, and Virginia Woolf to Bernadine Evaristo, London as a city has always instigated the literary imagination. By the nineteenth century, it had become not just the capital of the United Kingdom, but also of a sprawling world-wide empire. This also meant that the city became host to a diverse range of stories, storytellers, and writers that have responded to both its physical and imagined dimensions. Taking a cue from Pascale Casanova’sThe World Republic of Letters, but correcting it to account for the impact of empire, this essay tracks the ways in which London emerged as the global centre of literary and aesthetic production and as a universal arbiter of taste in the early decades of the twentieth century, through the decades of decolonization in the middle of the twentieth century, and leading up to the contemporary moment in which its status as a literary capital is subject to new uncertainties that are enmeshed in the political economy of contemporary world literature.The essay focalizes this discussion through two linked tropes—the city’s “exhibitionary complex” and its “circulatory network”.

This chapter looks at how the postcolonial negotiates the Gothic. Both are informed by a degree of suspicion about European Enlightenment rationalism and its constructs, but the Gothic also depends on colonial European elements – the Devil as Black, the Oriental artefact, obeah – for its effects. The postcolonial Gothic needs these effects – for the scream, as I argue, is central to the Gothic – but cannot use the same instruments because, by definition, postcolonialism adopts a critical and questioning attitude to colonial European discourses as well. By looking at a number of texts, especially the Caribbean Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the South African André Brink’s Devil’s Valley, the Australian Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, and the British-Indian Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, I show how the Gothic villain or the Gothic secret is manipulated by postcolonialism to combine its critical perspectives with the Gothic’s generic requirements.

This chapter examines Caribbean writing of the 1950s–1960s in relation to modernism as a concept, movement, and literary practice. Based on writing by Caribbean intellectuals, including C. L. R. James, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, and Édouard Glissant, and building on work by critics Simon Gikandi, Charles Pollard, Mary Lou Emery, Maria Cristina Fumagali, and others, it identifies a project of questioning modernism that challenged Eurocentric notions of Enlightenment modernity while contributing to modernist aesthetics. Further, it suggests that Caribbean writers of that period anticipated and currently inspire revisions of mainstream modernist studies. Critical reassessments of the Windrush generation, including feminist critiques of canon formation (J. Dillon Brown, Peter Kalliney, Faith Smith, Leah Rosenberg, and Alison Donnell), help support the essay’s argument for the importance of earlier decades of Caribbean modernism along with translinguistic philosophical and artistic influences. Specific readings focus on interactions among literary and visual arts – especially in the work of Lamming, Harris, Kamau Brathwaite, Roger Mais, and Aubrey Williams. In the writing of Harris, Brathwaite, and Jean Rhys, the essay locates ‘tropes of brokenness’ as ground for new concepts of the individual, new portrayals of vision, and a Caribbean modernist poetics based on creolized and indigenous arts.

Today, colonial literary models are joined by mid-twentieth-century anticolonial and postcolonial models, and combine to constitute a rich archive from which Caribbean writers can draw in order to make sense of the region’s position within global capitalism. The texts considered in this essay demonstrate contemporary writing’s sustained commitment to rewriting the earlier texts that have shaped the region’s writing from the beginning, but now in a manner that self-reflexively considers its own regional literary canons in autointertextual ways. This chapter shows how contemporary writing develops trans-textual and trans-historical networks across generations and histories in order to engage with the possibilities for reconciling colonial and postcolonial history, in ways that can make sense of the present. Moreover, this essay also highlights how it does this through formal experiments with Caribbean literature’s own genealogical entanglements.

Scholars such as Ian Smith, Jennifer Rahim, Nadia Ellis, Kezia Page, Rosamond King, and Timothy Chin have debunked the idea that sex and sexuality were either peripheral to or absent from the concerns of writers of the 1920s to 1970s. An examination of the sociocultural and literary-discursive mores that may have shaped the codes by which writers and critics addressed sexual issues enables an important re-evaluation of the relationship between literary works and the politics of respectability and heteronormativity often associated with the anglophone Caribbean. This examination attends to treatments of sex and sexuality that engage with nationalism, social status, queer desire, and cultural identity, and considers whether, how, and why the literary representations shifted at different points during this period and among different language traditions.

Following the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, per Evelyn O’Callaghan, Jean Rhys held a singular and pre-eminent position as the most widely known and systemically surveyed anglophone woman writer, but despite her literary project of decolonization, various critics describe the position of Rhys and her text as initially and continuously contested. Indeed, the ‘absence’ of women writers during the male-dominated nationalist period as well as their later emergence in the USA accounts for African American genealogies of Caribbean women’s writing advanced by scholars such as Carole Boyce Davies and Belinda Edmondson. Attention to Rhys’ insider/outsider ambiguity in that nationalist literary era evinces her influence on subsequent Caribbean writing, however, and an examination of works by Caribbean writers, spanning both of what Donette Francis refers to as the ‘second’ and ‘third waves’, suggests that writers consistently return to Rhys’ iconic novel not only as an ur-narrative of place, space, and identity for the anglophone Caribbean female subject but also as a source of what Elaine Savory dubs Rhys’ ‘productive contradictions’ as a literary foremother. This essay thus examines Rhys’ work and the complexities of its reception diachronically in conversation with some of these writers, assessing its manifold genealogical impacts both in its time and the present. Writers discussed include Jean Rhys, Marlon James, Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, Robert Antoni, Michelle Cliff, Elizabeth Nunez, and Kamau Brathwaite.

Instead of pastoral retreat, it is only through confrontation with the political powers sustaining human environments that recovery may begin to take place. For the United Kingdom this meant coming to terms with its increasingly unsustainable empire. In Chapter 4, “Uprooting Empire,” I explore how Jean Rhys presents the failures of interwar recovery in Europe, the failure to find rest and the return to war, as an environmental justice issue stemming from the continued colonial subjection of foreign lands. Tracing the colonial history of Rhys’s homeland Dominica in her 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight, I argue that protagonist Sasha Jansen’s inability to rest points to larger geopolitical inequalities that continue to deny large portions of the global population the ability to generate meaningful change. The chapter traces how the field of ecology arose through explicit ties to imperial projects of territory control and resource management. I challenge uncritical visions of the “ecological” as inherently benevolent or just, and pursue instead an understanding of ecology as fragile and subject to violent and exploitative power relations.