Island Rewrites: Postcolonial Caribbean, British and Irish Revisions.

This dissertation investigates the representation of the relationship between coloniser and colonised in Caribbean literature, through an exploration of texts that are re-workings of, responses to, and dramatic adaptations of European texts that form part of the colonial canon. This dissertation has as its background the overarching question of how literature, both European and Caribbean, has responded to significant events through history, and what part it has played in contributing to reconciliation, revolution and defining independent national identity, inclusive of the unique cultural and regional identity that is prevalent in the Caribbean. This dissertation is divided into three chapters organised along geographic lines. Within these sections analysis of the imitation and intertextuality between the original text and its Caribbean counterpart is explored. The analysis traces the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised and the ways in which social, cultural and political events shape and transform an artist’s interpretation of this relationship. This dissertation is concerned with the concept of ‘de-colonisation’ and the varying approaches to achieving de-colonisation, through a return to pre-colonised language and culture, or through the embracing of hybridism and syncretism. To explore this concept, the discussion engages with postcolonial theorists such as Homi K. Bhabha, Frantz Fanon and Edward Said - as well as the extant body of literature that surrounds postcolonial studies - in order to investigate the occurrences of rewriting, response and adaptation, and the ways in which the postcolonial Caribbean works destabilise and dislodge the authority of ‘colonial’ canonical texts. Most notably, Chapter Two: Ireland and The Caribbean: Shared History, Shared Words, explores the relationship between the postcolonial nations of Ireland and the Caribbean. The texts considered in this chapter reveal the united by experience of colonialism and the ‘kinship’ felt by poets and playwrights that share aspects of culture, language and literature.