Reading the West Indies

Examines how historic events occurring in the Caribbean during the long eighteenth-century Atlantic world helped to shape, if not entirely invent, genres of the novel familiar to us to this day

At the center of some of the most influential literature of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the Caribbean influenced and shaped the development of modern genres of the novel familiar to us to this day.

Exploring the intersection of British Atlantic modernity and the transatlantic novel in the long eighteenth century with geographic focus on the Caribbean, Reading the West Indies examines historic events occurring during the long eighteenth-century Atlantic world that helped to shape, if not entirely invent, genres of the modern novel. Through a chronological focus, bracketed by historical events in the British Caribbean, this work traces the earliest iterations of the novel from the Robinsonade genre to the politicized British Caribbean gothic.

Reading the West Indies contributes to the scholarly endeavors of globalizing the eighteenth century and considers how the novel is an artifact of transatlanticism as opposed to firmly originating in an insulated Europe. Owing the conceptual framework to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Candace Ward, Srinivas Aravamudan, and many others, Dr. Victoria Barnett-Woods argues that specific, but important genres to the development of the novel, were dependent upon the historical events occurring in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. These genres generate a more global understanding of the novel’s representation of the “individual experience,” a tenet of narrative formal realism that is intimately connected to theories surrounding modernity and is at the heart of British intellectual and social thought.