English Literature Seminar Series
THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN CANCELLED
Week 4
Friday 7 February, 16.30–18.00, Screening Room (G.04, 50 George Square)
Dawn Sherratt-Bado (Queen’s University Belfast), ‘Creolising the Canon: Caryl Phillips, Jean Rhys, and the Brontës’.
This talk will examine the Caribbean tradition of reworking canonical novels by the Brontës. Caryl Phillips adapts Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in his novel The Lost Child (2015). This is in keeping with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre told from the perspective of Bertha Mason. I will problematise these canonically ‘British’ writers by addressing the fact that Phillips is a multiply diasporic, mixed-race Caribbean writer living between Britain, St Kitts, and America. I will consider Phillips’s text in light of Rhys's diasporic position as a white Creole from Dominica, and Emily and Charlotte Brontë's position as second-generation Irish immigrants living in England. This study coincides with the ‘Brontë 200’ programme of bicentenary celebrations.