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Exhuming caliban : gothic and madness in late twentieth and twenty-first - century Caribbean literary fictions

Abstract

Exhuming Caliban: Gothic and Madness in Late Twentieth and Twenty-First - Century Caribbean Literary Fictions identifies a late twentieth and twenty-first - century (1980-2007) creative literary trend that is characterized by applications of quasi-gothic and traditional gothic literary conventions and features in Caribbean fictions, and extensively investigates the historical, cultural and literary origins of each contributing aspect of this phenomenon. This dissertation analyzes the interactive relationship between knowledge and discourse and its discursive power in the formation of representation processes. I, then, trace the historical origins and literary genealogies of gothic literature to mark the cultural and discursive connections between Western European and Caribbean literatures. In addition to this literary genealogy, I present a psychoanalytical analysis that configures a psychological profile to explain an overarching thematic emphasis on madness in gothic literature. I examine the Western European historical and cultural preoccupation with madness and its diagnoses, a trend that influenced the formations of many late medieval, early modern and modern Western European social norms, cultural systems, political institutions, philosophical notions, ideological principles and literary production. It is within the context of Europe's sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth - centuries' development of a "cultural madness" that I connect Western European literature and gothic literary conventions to the development of Caribbean literature. I illustrate how this concept of madness permeated the discursive process that constructed the Caribbean region and its inhabitants within preconceptions formed by the Western European Imaginary. I, then, illustrate how Caribbean manifestations of Western European "culture of madness" have been internalized by generations of Caribbean inhabitants and show how these conventions and features function to reveal the hidden, unspoken unspeakable in late twentieth and twenty-first - century Caribbean literary works. I contend that this literary trend allows Caribbean writers to rewrite Caribbean subjectivities on their own terms, negating those constructed by the European Imaginary, and to address the general invisibility that shrouds the region and its peoples in the midst of global neocolonial indifference and exploitation

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