Bénédicte Ledent

Caryl Phillips’s drama: Liminal fiction under construction?

Most of the existing criticism on Caryl Phillips deals with his novels or his essays. His plays, which were for the most part written in the 1980s, have received comparatively little attention. This article argues that Phillips’s dramatic production should be examined closely because it contains in a nutshell some of the themes and characters that recur in his more mature work and therefore form the backbone of his world vision. Such a comparative approach helps to highlight Phillips’s artistic consistency and his ability to give different forms to similar concerns. More specifically, its aim is to show to what extent Phillips’s novel In the Falling Snow (2009) is a liminal text that is in fact built upon the preoccupations at the heart of his early plays, most notably Strange Fruit (1981), Where There Is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983).

The "Aesthetics of Personalism" in Caryl Phillips's Writing: Complexity as a New Brand of Humanism.

Abstract This paper attempts to underline the epistemological implications of Phillipss handling of diasporic history through a focus on individual lives in Cambridge (1991) and The Nature of Blood (1997). His confessional first‐person narratives highlight the intricacies inherent in human nature, thereby resisting the globalizing discourse of liberal humanism. Even more importantly, his fictions seem to illustrate a new, more understanding approach to this often hackneyed term, for they give voice to individuals whose multiple differences are, paradoxically, part proof of a common humanity, viewed here as an inclusive rather than exclusive concept.

“Minor” genres in postcolonial literatures: New webs of meaning

It is now widely acknowledged that the field of postcolonial studies has been by and large averse to exploring aesthetic matters (see Boehmer 2010; Hiddleston 2011; Hitchcock 2003), save for discus...

Radio drama and its avatars in the work of Caryl Phillips

Abstract Between 1984 and 2016 Caryl Phillips wrote nine radio plays which were all broadcast on the BBC. Meant for a different circuit of communication than his novels, essays and published stage plays, Phillips’s radio plays might be dismissed as minor writing, yet they constitute a fascinating, under-investigated body of texts which are worth exploring alongside the rest of his work. Thematically, Phillips’s radio drama covers similar ground to his fiction and essays. Starting from this sense of familiarity, this article examines the formal and communicative specificities at play in Phillips’s contributions to the radio drama genre. Focusing on two radio plays entitled Crossing the River (1985) and A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris (2004), this piece discusses which features of this marginal genre inform Phillips’s radio-dramatic characterization of protagonists with complex identities, but also, more generally, how these aspects infuse his formally experimental fiction.

Of Invisible Men and Native Sons: Male Characters in Caryl Phillips's Fiction

This essay focuses on the work of Caryl Phillips, a British author of Caribbean origin. It examines how his character-driven fiction has addressed masculinities over the years. The first part starts from the observation of a relative deficit in masculine visibility in Phillips’ fiction from The Final Passage (1985) to A Distant Shore (2003) and takes a closer look at these “invisible men”, analyzing what features they share and also examining the reasons, narrative and otherwise, behind their relative inconspicuousness. The second part of the essay concentrates on Phillips’ latest novel, In the Falling Snow (2009), which is concerned with a “native son” of a kind and his relationships with his own father. The prominent male presence in this book not only begs for a re-examination of the male figures in Phillips’ earlier fiction, it also calls into question the dichotomies that often permeate conventional approaches to gender.

Race and antiracism in black British and British Asian literature

philosophical hesitation between the particular and the universal; and The Carpathians neutralizes its own imperative to occupy a point of view as the textual composition enacts, as well as describes, the effects of the Gravity Star. In Cronin’s hands, Frame’s novels turn into a nest of ambushes, self-sabotage and warring elements, signs of a dynamic and nuanced sense of textuality. Cronin takes some shortcuts in her introduction by pointing readers who seek background information on Frame criticism and the foundational concept of the author function towards other critical works. Foucault’s seminal “What Is an Author?” is mentioned only in passing, and when Cronin introduces her account as “yet another portrait to hang in Frame studies’ ever-expanding gallery of Framean personae” (18), I’d have appreciated at least a quick sketch of what other portraits hang in this critical gallery, and how they are arranged. I wonder whether Cronin’s conclusion also shies away from exploiting the fullest realization of her study; does she not limn out a general method of textual analysis, something wider than a set of findings about Frame’s specific techniques? Overall, however, The Frame Function offers a self-aware, well-informed, and comprehensive analysis of the hermeneutic twists of Frame’s constantly surprising oeuvre.

Review of Lawrence Phillips's The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London and John McLeod's Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis

At a crucial moment in Edmund Spenser’s prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), the experienced Irenius considers the planting of English garrisons in a conquered country. Eudoxus, patsy to an old pro’s promptings, interrupts: ‘I ame ignorante of the places yeat I will take the mapp of Irelande before me and make myne eyes in the meane while my Scollemasters to guide my understandinge to judge of your plott.’ In Spenser’s punning prose, the eyes are both schoolmasters and ‘skull masters,’ spiritual and corporeal guiding lights. That Spenser’s Irish map unfolds during an exchange around military conquest suggests that cartography, in a colonial context, is never neutral. The Renaissance was an age of mapping, when images of newly ‘discovered’ lands accompanied inroads into familiar places, viewed afresh through eyes accustomed to other worlds. Yet to date that fact has mattered most to geographers. Literary critics have been content to chart changes in language and culture over time rather than across space. Even those concerned with colonialism and empire have been preoccupied with texts rather than topographies. The ‘paper landscape’ spoken of by geographers such as J. H. Andrews has been under-examined. This provocative and stimulating collection, covering relatively uncharted terrain, bringing together distinct and diverse ways of thinking about the subject, is a welcome addition to cultural studies in the early modern period, marking a move away from purely literary sources and concerns. Originating in a 1997 conference entitled ‘Paper Landscapes: Maps, Texts, and the Construction of Space, 1500 – 1700,’ it boasts only one scholar among its dozen contributors who is not primarily a literary specialist – none could be said to be a geographer by training – but as the notion of Geography as a distinct field is only just emerging in the period, this is no barrier. The impact of cultural studies and postcolonial criticism has placed territorial claims and conflicts at the heart of literary debates, and there is an impressive range of reference here to critical authorities from Bhabha to Schama. The ‘graveyard of topicality,’ especially as applied to Shakespeare, is a plot being renegotiated through detailed knowledge of what John Speed aptly termed in his atlas of 1611, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain. The book is divided into two parts, ‘Contested Spaces’ and ‘Literature and Landscape,’ and the editors have done a splendid job matching stringent scene-setting with a subsequent series of subtle engagements with literary texts by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Spenser and Drayton. Each essay builds on a body of interdisciplinary work that has grown out of – and arguably outgrown – new historicism and cultural materialism.