with representations of community, are particularly appropriate and enabling as a vehicle through which to conceptualise Caribbean communities. The book covers short story collections and cycles by Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, Alecia Mckenzie, Lawrence Scott, Mark Mcwatt, Robert Antoni and Dionne Brand. It argues that the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers' imagining of communities which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of community, bringing literary representations of community into dialogue with models of community developed in the field of Caribbean anthropology. The works analysed are set in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana, and in several cases the setting extends to the Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America. Looking in turn at rural, urban, national and global communities, the book draws attention to changing conceptions of community around the turn of the millennium. * The book is the first monograph on Caribbean short stories. * It is the first book-length study to directly address the subject of community in Anglophone Caribbean literature. * The book covers the work of eight critically acclaimed Caribbean writers. * Due to the centrality of short story writing to the development of a Caribbean literary tradition, the book offers readers an accessible introduction to the broader field of Caribbean literature and culture. * With its interdisciplinary approach, the book will appeal to Caribbeanists working in social science disciplines as well as those working in literary and cultural studies. |