Multiplying Perspectives through Text and Time: Jamaica Kincaid's Writing of the Collective

Authors

  • Antonia Purk University of Erfurt

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.192

Keywords:

Repetition and revision, autobiography, Caribbean collective history, historiopoiesis

Abstract

Throughout Jamaica Kincaid’s fictional works, the literary technique of narrative repetition and revision multiplies narrative perspectives both with regard to singular events as well as through generations and thereby through history, pointing back to the year 1492. This article demonstrates how Kincaid thus inscribes a multitude of perspectives into what has hitherto been largely read as autobiographical fiction and, in this way, engages collective Caribbean experience as profoundly affected by the history of colonialism and slavery.

Author Biography

Antonia Purk, University of Erfurt

Antonia Purk is a PhD student at the Department of American Literature of the University of Erfurt. She has earned her master’s degree in Comparative and American Literature from the University of Erfurt in 2012 and has since then worked on her PhD project, which is concerned with the imaginative engagement of history in the literary works of Jamaica Kincaid. In her analyses she puts a special emphasis on text, image, and body as media of historiopoiesis.

Downloads

Published

2014-06-07

How to Cite

Purk, Antonia. “Multiplying Perspectives through Text and Time: Jamaica Kincaid’s Writing of the Collective”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, June 2014, doi:10.5283/copas.192.

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 1 (2014)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.