Despite its cozy image, the bungalow in literature and film is haunted by violence even while fostering possibilities for personal transformation, utopian social vision and even comedy. Originating in Bengal and adapted as housing for colonialist ventures worldwide, the homes were sold in mail-order kits during the "bungalow mania" of the early 20th century and enjoyed a revival at century's end. The bungalow as fictional setting stages ongoing contradictions of modernity-home and homelessness, property and dispossession, self and other-prompting a rethinking of our images of house and home. Drawing on the work of writers, architects and film directors, including Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Amitav Ghosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, Willa Cather, Buster Keaton and Walter Mosley, this study offers new readings of the transcultural bungalow.

Vision is a recurring obsession in the work of twentieth-century Caribbean writers. This ambitious study offers a comprehensive analysis of the visual in authors from the Anglophone Caribbean as they intersect with mainstream Modernism. While sound cultures have received more attention in studies of the Caribbean, this is the first to analyse acts of seeing, inner vision, and reflections on visual art. Mary Lou Emery analyses the art, theatre, and literature of the early twentieth century, including works by Edna Manley and Una Marson, then turns to George Lamming, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, and a younger generation including Jamaica Kincaid and David Dabydeen. She argues that their preoccupation with vision directly addresses philosophies of sensory perception developed at the height of the slave trade and emerges in conditions of diaspora continuing into the present. This study is an original and important contribution to transatlantic and postcolonial studies.

Vision is a recurring obsession in the work of twentieth-century Caribbean writers. This ambitious study offers a comprehensive analysis of the visual in authors from the Anglophone Caribbean as they intersect with mainstream Modernism. While sound cultures have received more attention in studies of the black Atlantic, this is the first to analyse acts of seeing, inner vision, and reflections on visual art. Mary Lou Emery analyses Caribbean art, theater, and literature of the early twentieth century, including works by Edna Manley and Una Marson, then turns to George Lamming, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, and a younger generation including Jamaica Kincaid and David Dabydeen. She argues that their preoccupation with vision directly addresses philosophies of sensory perception developed at the height of the slave trade and emerges in conditions of diaspora continuing into the present. This study is an original and important contribution to transatlantic and postcolonial studies.

The Caribbean Islands have long been an uneasy meeting place among indigenous peoples, white European colonists, and black slave populations. Tense oppositions in Caribbean culture-colonial vs. native, white vs. black, male conqueror vs. female subject-supply powerful themes and spark complex narrative experiments in the fiction of Dominica-born novelist Jean Rhys. In this pathfinding study, Mary Lou Emery focuses on Rhys's handling of these oppositions, using a Caribbean cultural perspective to replace the mainly European aesthetic, moral, and psychological standards that have served to misread and sometimes devalue Rhys's writing. Emery considers all five Rhys novels, beginning with Wide Sargasso Sea as the most explicitly Caribbean in its setting, in its participation in the culminating decades of a West Indian literary naissance, and most importantly, in its subversive transformation of European concepts of character. From a sociocultural perspective, she argues persuasively that the earlier novels-Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight-should be read as emergent Caribbean fiction, written in tense dialogue with European modernism. Building on this thesis, she reveals how the apparent passivity, masochism, or silence of Rhys's female protagonists results from their doubly marginalized status as women and as subject peoples. Also, she explores how Rhys's women seek out alternative identities in dreamed of, magically realized, or chosen communities. These discoveries offer important insights on literary modernism, Caribbean fiction, and the formation of female identity.

"Narrative and Culture" draws together fourteen essays in which leading scholars discuss narrative texts and practices in a variety of media and genres, subjecting them to sustained cultural analysis. The essays cross national borders and historical periods as often and as easily as they traverse disciplinary boundaries, and they examine canonical fiction as well as postmodern media--photography, film, television. The primary subject of these pieces, notes Janice Carlisle, is "the relation between the telling of tales and the engagement of their tellers and listeners in the practices of specific societies."
Contributors: Nina Auerbach, Thomas B. Byers, Jay Clayton, Marcel Cornis-Pope, Mary Lou Emery, Colleen Kennedy, Vera Mark, Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Paul Morrison, Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey, John Carlos Rowe, Daniel R. Schwarz, Carol Siegel, Felipe Smith