Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women's Writing and Decolonization »

In Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts, Kathleen J. Renk demonstrates how contemporary Anglophone Caribbean women's writing radically subverts the powerful myth of the family as it is constructed in nineteenth-century British and colonial texts. Reading the fiction of Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand, Jean Rhys, Erna Brodber, and Michelle Cliff alongside British texts such as Dickens's Great Expectations and Bronte's Jane Eyre, she argues that Anglophone Caribbean women writers create new narratives that simultaneously "bury" Victorian ghosts--the discourse on the Victorian mother, the plantation family discourse, and the discourse on madness--and "catch" Caribbean shadows--the histories of forgotten or elided Caribbean ancestors and narratives of resistance.