Evelyn A. Williams, a former teacher of art and design, is a practising painter with a recently established studio in Guyana, where she applies the principles of Mbari. Current research interests include Denis Williams's artworks and the vernacular architecture of the Village Movement. --Book Jacket.
Denis Williams, painter, teacher, novelist, archaeologist, and cultural administrator, is one of the founding fathers of modern Guyana. His involvement in several of the country’s key cultural institutions and his pioneering work on Guyana’s founding peoples ensures him a special place in the country’s history books. Williams also contributed to the outpouring of literature that accompanied the awakening consciousness of Caribbean nations and their drive for independence. His literary work is seminal in depicting the character of the Caribbean person and landscape, and the nature of ancestral (African and Afro-Caribbean) identities. His studies of African art and culture encouraged the young nation of Guyana to turn away from Western epistemologies and to pay serious intellectual attention to other origins. His research into the archaeology and culture of the Amerindian population of Guyana and beyond laid the pathway for further scholarship. The essays assembled here bring together eminent scholars and commentators to offer authoritative analyses of the various aspects of Williams’s work – artistic, academic, and literary – and capture the rationale for, the interconnections between, and the evident trajectory of Williams’s life work as the epitome of the changing nature of the Caribbean condition. As well as wide-ranging biographical essays, and studies of Williams’s activities as a painter, the collection contains a comprehensive primary and secondary bibliography, a generous selection of colour plates, and individual essays devoted to the published novels (Other Leopards; The Third Temptation) and other published and unpublished fiction, and to Williams’s archaeological masterpiece, Prehistoric Guiana. Contributors: Ulli Beier, Vibert Cambridge, David Dabydeen, Charles Gore, Stanley Greaves, Wilson Harris, Louis James, Andrew Jefferson–Miles, Nicholas Laughlin, Andrew Lindsay, John Picton, Leon Wainwright, Anne Walmsley, Charlotte Williams, Evelyn A. Williams, Jennifer Wishart.
"Until now, only visitors to the National Gallery of Guyana would have had any chance of recognising just how outstanding an international artist Denis Williams was. This book presents a unique and long-overdue opportunity for the reader to access his art in all its range and variety, not least because its author, his daughter Evelyn A. Williams, provides access to paintings and drawings held by the family, rarely if ever seen before. What the book represents is a story of both an outstanding talent, praised world-wide, by the likes of Henry Moore and Salvador Dali, and a journey of searching integrity in which Williams placed the necessity of his vision before any urge to win the plaudits of fame and fortune in the art world. It is a story of a constant need to expand the forms of his art and to escape from constriction." -- Book jacket.
Lionel Froad hopes to rediscover Lobo, his alter ego from ancestral times, while on an architectural survey in the horn of Africa. Instead, he finds himself having complex relationships between his filial, white boss and a stunning girl from Wales, both of whom distract him from his goal. Eventually, Lionel is forced to recognize the painful division between his New World self and ancestry as a result of slavery and centuries of separation.
Denis Johnson's New York Times bestseller, The Laughing Monsters, is a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game. Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years' absence, he returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country's civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair has allowed himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless. Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune and who claims to have served, at various times, the Ghanaian army, the Kuwaiti Emiri Guard, and the American Green Berets. He's probably broke now, but he remains, at thirty-six, as stirred by his own doubtful schemes as he was a decade ago. Although Nair believes some kind of money-making plan lies at the back of it all, Adriko's stated reason for inviting his friend to Freetown is for Nair to meet Adriko's fiancée, a grad student from Colorado named Davidia. Together the three set out to visit Adriko's clan in the Uganda-Congo borderland—but each of these travelers is keeping secrets from the others. Their journey through a land abandoned by the future leads Nair, Adriko, and Davidia to meet themselves not in a new light, but rather in a new darkness.
In the decades following the immediately postwar period in Britain, a loose grouping of experimental writers that included Alan Burns, Christine Brooke-Rose, B. S. Johnson, and Ann Quin worked against the dominance, as they saw it, of the realist novel of the literary mainstream. Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel reassesses the experimentalism versus realism debates of the period, and finds a body of work engaged with, rather than merely antagonistic towards, the literary culture it sought to renovate. Charting these engagements, it shows how they have significance not just for our understanding of these decades but for the broader movement of the novel through the century. This volume takes some of the claims made about experimental fiction—that it is unreadable, nonlinear, elliptical, errant, plotless—and reimagines these descriptors as historically inscribed tendencies that express the period's investment in the idea of the accidental. These novels are interested in the fleeting and the fugitive, in discontinuity and shock. The experimental novel cultivates an interest in methods of representation that are oblique: attempting to conjure the world at an angle, or in the rear-view mirror; by ellipsis or evasion. These concepts—error, indeterminacy, uncertainty, accident—all bear a relation to that which evades or resists interpretation and meaning. Asking what are the wider political, ethical, and philosophical correlates of this incommensurability, Late Modernism and the Avant-Garde British Novel reads experimental literature in this light, as suffused with anxiety about its adequacy in the light of its status as necessarily imitative and derivative, and therefore redolent of the forms of not-knowing and uncertainty that mark late modernism more generally.
The texts that make up postcolonial print cultures are often found outside the archival catalogue, and in lesser-examined repositories such as personal collections, the streets, or appendages to established collections. This volume examines the published and unpublished writing, magazines, pamphlets, paratexts, advertisements, cartoons, radio, and street art that serve as the intellectual forces behind opposition to colonial orders, as meditations on the futures of embryonic nation states, and as visions of new forms of equality. The print cultures examined here are necessarily anti-institutional; they serve as a counterpoint to the colonial archive and, relatedly, to more traditional genres and text formats coming out of large-scale publishers. This means that much of the primary material analyzed in this book has not been scrutinized before. Many of these print productions articulate collective liberation projects with origins in the grassroots. They include debates around the shape of the postcolonial nation and the new state formation that necessarily draw on a diverse and contentious public sphere of opinion. Their rhetoric ranges from the reformist to the revolutionary. Reflecting the diversity, indeed the disorderliness, of postcolonial print cultures this book covers local, national, and transnational cultures from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Its wide-ranging essays offer a nuanced and, taken together, a definitive (though that is not to say comprehensive or systematic) study of a global phenomenon: postcolonial print cultures as a distinct literary field. The chapters recover the efforts of writers, readers and publishers to produce a postcolonialism 'from below', and thereby offer a range of fresh perspectives on the meaning and history of postcolonialism.
This volume explores the influence of the avant-garde French novel form known as Nouveau Roman on experimental prose fiction and post-war literary culture in Britain.
Difficult Reading offers a new approach to formal experimentation in Caribbean literature. In this insightful study, Jason Marley demonstrates how the aggressive, antagonistic elements common to the mid-twentieth-century Caribbean novel foster emotional responses that spark new forms of communal resistance against colonial power. Marley illustrates how experimental Caribbean writers repeatedly implicate their readers in colonial domination in ways that are intended to unsettle and discomfort. In works such as Denis Williams’s The Third Temptation, Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder, and Vera Bell’s overlooked prose poem Ogog, acts of colonial atrocity—such as the eradication of Indigenous populations in Guyana, the construction of the Panama Canal, or the disenfranchisement of Afro-Jamaican communities—become mired in aesthetic obfuscation, forcing the reader to confront and rethink their own relationship to these events. In this way, new literary forms engender new forms of insight and outrage, fostering a newly inspired relation to resistance.
How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during and leading up to the 1960s shape modern British fiction? The 1960s were the “swinging decade”: a newly energised youth culture went hand-in-hand with new technologies, expanding educational opportunities, new social attitudes and profound political differences between the generations. This volume explores the ways in which these apparently seismic changes were reflected in British fiction of the decade. Chapters cover feminist writing that fused the personal and the political, gay, lesbian and immigrant voices and the work of visionary experimental and science fiction writers. A major critical re-evaluation of the decade, this volume covers such writers as J.G. Ballard, Anthony Burgess, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, John Fowles, Christopher Isherwood, Doris Lessing, Michael Moorcock and V.S. Naipaul.