Authors: Thomas W. Krise
ISBN-13: 9780226453903, ISBN-10: 0226453901
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Date Published: December 1999
Edition: 1
Although the colonies in the West Indies were as important to the expanding British empire as those in North America, writings from the British West Indies have been conspicuously absent from anthologies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature. In this first literary anthology dedicated to the region, Thomas W. Krise gathers important but little-known descriptions, poems, narratives, satires, and essays written in and about this culturally rich and politically tempestuous region.
Caribbeana offers invaluable period commentaries on slavery, colonialism, gender relations, African and European history, natural history, agriculture, and medicine. Highlights include several of the earliest protests against slavery; a superb ode by the Cambridge-educated Afro-Jamaican poet Francis Williams; James Grainger's extended georgic poem, The Sugar Cane; Frances Seymour's poignant tale of the Englishman Inkle who sells his Indian savior-lover Yarico into slavery; and several descriptions of the West Indies during the early years of settlement.
Krise (English, Air Force Humanities Institute, U.S. Air Force Academy) presents a collection of descriptions, satires, poems, narratives, and essays written in and about the British colonies of the West Indies. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Acknowledgments | ||
A Note on the Text | ||
Introduction | 1 | |
1 | From A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657) | 16 |
2 | From Jamaica Viewed (1661) | 31 |
3 | From Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies (1684) | 51 |
4 | A Trip to Jamaica (1698) | 77 |
5 | A Speech Made by a Black of Guardaloupe (1709) | 93 |
6 | The Speech of Moses Bon Saam (1735) | 101 |
7 | From The Speech of Mr. John Talbot Campo-bell (1736) | 108 |
8 | The Story of Inkle and Yarico and An Epistle from Yarico to Inkle, After he had left her in Slavery (1738) | 141 |
9 | Poems from Caribbeana (1741) | 147 |
10 | The Sugar Cane: A Poem, In Four Books (1764) | 166 |
11 | From A General Description of the West-Indian Islands (1767) | 261 |
12 | "Carmen, or, an Ode," in Edward Long's A History of Jamaica (1774) | 315 |
13 | From Jamaica, a Poem, In Three Parts (1777) | 326 |
Notes | 341 |