Crossing the Line ─ Early Creole Novels and Anglophone Caribbean Culture in the Age of Emancipation

"Crossing the Line examines a group of novels by white creoles -- white writers whose identities and perspectives were shaped by their experiences in Britain's Caribbean colonies. Four novels anchor the study: three anonymously published works, Montgomery; or, the West-Indian Adventurer (1812-13), Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827) and Marly; or, A Planter's Life in Jamaica (1828), and E. L. Joseph's Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole (1838). Revealing the contradictions embedded in the texts' constructions of the Caribbean 'realities' they seek to dramatize, Candace Ward shows how these white creole authors gave birth to characters and enlivened settings and situations in ways that shed light on the many sociopolitical fictions that shaped life in theanglophone Atlantic" --

Candace Ward, Associate Professor of English at Florida State University, is author of Desire and Disorder: Fever, Fictions, and Feeling in English Georgian Culture.