Rich Man in His Castle, Poor Ones Take the Street: Integrating the 'Canonical' Text and Popular Culture

"George Lamming was influenced by existing narrative structures and concerns of West Indian carnival forms to create his novel. An understanding of these forms is important for critiquing West Indian literature, and for better understanding social relations in the countries of the region. This study explores the similarities in strategies, devices and themes used by George Lamming in his much respected landmark Caribbean text 'In the Castle of My Skin', and several popular forms of the carnivalesque. It draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's model of the carnivalesque, supplementing it with borrowings from Kamau Brathwaite's model of creolisation, and from analyses made by others including Richard Burton and Curwen Best."