Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature

A comprehensive historical and theoretical study of the creolization process and its relevance to both colonial and postcolonial literatures, this book focuses for the most part on novels from or about the French Caribbean. It examines the ways in which colonial authors such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Victor Hugo, as well as such contemporary writers as fdouard Glissant and Daniel Maximin, have represented the process of cultural mixing and (con)fusion to which, under a variety of names (creolization, hybridity, mZtissage), postcolonial theorists have increasingly turned in order to understand the complexities of cultural identity in today s transnational world. Notwithstanding the obvious differences separating colonial and postcolonial literatures, Islands and Exiles emphasizes their entanglements, mapping out a middle ground in which they are ambivalently linked to one another.