Atlantic Passages : History, Community, and Language in the Fiction of Sam Selvon

Caribbean novelist Sam Selvon was part of the new wave of post-war West Indian writers - George Lamming, V.S.

Naipaul, and Derek Walcott among others - who would redefine what English literature meant.

In novels such as A Brighter Sun and The Lonely Londoners, Selvon invented a literary language at once playful and engaging, moving to the rhythms of both literary modernism and Caribbean folk tales and calypsos.

Atlantic Passages is the first book-length study to place Selvon's fiction at the center of postcolonial theoretical debates.

It measures Selvon's novels against their social and cultural contexts, gauging their productive counterpoise with ideas of history and community.

More fully than any previous study, it maps the landscape of Selvon's novels and their fictional confrontation with modernity in the immigrant enclaves of London and the newly independent Caribbean islands.