Early Caribbean Anglophone Literature

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of the history of early Anglophone Caribbean literary studies. In the 1970s and 1980s, this literature was understood to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, a body of texts that emerged (or came of age) in the twentieth century, crafted largely by people of color born (or with familial roots) in the Caribbean. Since then, scholars have expanded the temporal and thematic scope of the literature, looking to texts produced by British and white creole writers in the sixteenth–nineteenth centuries that mediate discussions about gender, race, imperialism, and the transatlantic slave trade.