Caryl Phillips: Writing in the Key of Life (Cross/Cultures)

2012 Rodopi hardcover edition. Unread copy in very good condition. From the cover: Writing in the Key of Life is the first critical collection devoted to the British-Caribbean author Caryl Phillips, a major voice in contemporary anglophone literatures. Phillips’s impressive body of fiction, drama, and non-fiction has garnered wide praise for its formal inventiveness and its incisive social criticism as well as its unusually sensitive understanding of the human condition. The twenty-six contributions offered here, including two by Phillips himself, address the fundamental issues that have preoccupied the writer in his now three-decades-long career - the enduring legacy of history, the intricate workings of identity, and the pervasive role of race, class, and gender in societies worldwide. Most of Phillips’s writing is covered here, in essays that approach it from various thematic and interpretative angles. These include the interplay of fact and fiction, Phillips’s sometimes ambiguous literary affiliations, his long-standing interest in the black and Jewish diasporas, his exploration of Britain and its ‘Others’, and his recurrent use of motifs such as masking and concealment. Contents: Caryl Phillips: Writing in the Key of Life Edited by Benedicte Ledent and Daria Tunca Introduction - Benedicte Ledent and Daria Tunca Preamble - Caryl Phillips PART I: CARYL PHILLIPS: 25 YEARS OF WRITING Oxford - Peter H. Marsden 'Uncomfortable Truths': Caryl Phillips in Conversation - Fatim Boutros Distant Shores? - Caryl Phillips Caryl Phillips and After: Reflections on Contemporary Black British Film and Television - Dave Gunning 'The key of life': A Tribute to Caryl Phillips - Chika Unigwe PART II: AUTOBIOGRAPHY, FACT AND FICTION 'Of course, I am not a historian': An Interview with Caryl Phillips - Renee T. Schatteman Diffraction of the Self in Caryl Phillips's A New World Order - Louise Yelin 'The New World Order' of Caryl Phillips's Critical Essays - Thomas Bonnici 'The world is text': Caryl Phillips and the European Literary Canon - Alessandra Di Maio 'Self-inflicted wounds': Free Will, Defeat and Dignity in the Work of Caryl Phillips - Benedicte Ledent PART III: THE INTRICATE WORKINGS OF IDENTITY Madness, Memory, and Compassion in Caryl Phillips's Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood - Stef Craps 'The nature of blood' / The Blood of Nature: Transcending the Trauma of Diaspora - Gordon Collier Glimpses of Freedom: Agency and Subversion in Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River and The Atlantic Sound - Malik Ferdinand Foreign Bodies: Intersections of Gender, Race and Class in A Distant Shore - Cindy Gabrielle Transcultural Identities in Caryl Phillips's Fiction: Form and Theme - Itala Vivan PART IV: RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER Black, Female and White: Domesticity, Gender and Class in Cambridge - Sandra Courtman 'Unfathomable mystery': The Construction of the Black Female Subject in Caryl Phillips's Cambridge - Petra Tournay-Theodotou Fractured Identities: Madness and Isolation in Higher Ground and A Distant Shore - Wendy Knepper 'A world of people, not of countries': Hybridity and Belonging in A Distant Shore - Joan Miller Powell Beyond the Narrative of Victimhood: Empowerment and Resistance in Caryl Phillips's Fiction - Abigail Ward PART V: THE ENDURING LEGACY OF HISTORY Re-Mapping the Black Atlantic: Caryl Phillips and the Legacies of Imperialism - John McLeod Remembering the Slave Trade: Collective Memory and Historiography in Crossing the River - Tsunehiko Kato Parallels and Overlaps: The Black and Jewish Diasporas in The Nature of Blood - Lucie Gillet The Ghosts of Slavery: Haunting and History in Caryl Phillips's Fiction - Kirpal Singh 'A voice of one's own': Creative Writing and the Historical Imagination - Imen Najar.…