Oriente: towards a literary geography

The larger question framing this paper is: What kind of Caribbean literary history might now be written? The tentative answer framing the paper is: a literary geogra- phy. The theoretical context of the paper is therefore provided by the idea of ‘place’. Attention to place is hardly new within literary studies. However, to write a literary history based on place is to suggest a different kind of attention to writing and a different angle of approach to questions of intertextuality. The case study here is Oriente, the eastern part of Cuba; and the paper will want to sketch some of the gen- eral characteristics of the writing associated with that place in a very preliminary manner, as well as looking more closely at two or three examples, drawn from the 1890s and the 1950s.