The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction

This groundbreaking?book analyzes the theme of community in seven French Caribbean novels in relation to the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. The complex history of the islands means that community is often a central and problematic issue in their literature, underlying a range of other questions such as political agency, individual and collective subjectivity, attitudes towards the past and the future, and even the literary form itself. Celia Britton here studies a range of key books from the region,?including Edouard Glissant’s Le Quatrieme Siecle, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit, and Vincent Placoly’s L’eau-de-mort guildive, among others.

Celia Britton is professor of French at University College London. Her previous books include Claude Simon: Writing the Visible and Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance.