V S Naipaul Caribbean Writing And Caribbean Thought

V.S. Naipaul was one of the most influential and controversial writers of the twentieth century. His writings on colonialism and its aftermath, on migration and landscape, and on cultural loss and creativity, were both admired and criticised by a wide global audience. But what of his relationship to the region of his birth? Born in Trinidad, of Indian ancestry, and spending his professional life in England, Naipaul could be dismissive of his Caribbean background. He presented himself as a citizen of nowhere, or else, of the globalized, postcolonial world. However, this obscures his intense competition, fierce disagreements and close collaboration with other Caribbean intellectuals, both as a schoolchild in colonial Trinidad, and as an internationally celebrated author. V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought looks again at Naipaul's relationship with his birthplace. It shows that that the decolonising Caribbean was the crucible in which Naipaul's style and outlook were formed. Moreover, understanding Naipaul's place in the history of the region's politics and letters sheds new light on the work of celebrated contemporaries, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming and Maryse Condè, Elsa Goveia and Eric Williams, Sylvia Wynter and C.L.R. James. Literary criticism, intellectual biography, and an essay in the history of ideas, this book offers a new account of Caribbean thought in the decades after independence. It reveals a literary culture of creative vibrancy, in an era of unprecedented change.

Combining an intellectual biography of V.S. Naipaul with a history of cultural thought in the postcolonial Caribbean, this book gives a revisionary portrait of one of the great authors of the twentieth century, and tells an insightful and compelling story about the evolution of Caribbean ideas.

This introductory study offers a critical overview of the major works of V. S. Naipaul from 1950 to the present day. Professor Mustafa's main concern is with literary issues, but historical, political and cultural questions are also addressed, with comparative references to other postcolonial works. Paradoxically, a major segment of Naipaul's non-western, pro-decolonisation readership seized on negative elements in his thinking, while Western reaction to his ideas and themes led to set notions about Third-World society. Thus, his work has always been the object of radically divergent views, dependent on the perspective of the reader. In examining this issue, Mustafa introduces general debates about postcolonial literary production and its contemporary interrogation of narrative techniques, language, gender, race, and canon formulation.

An up-to-date critical survey of all Naipaul's major work giving a cohesive view of his artistic development.

Naipaul’s first work of travel writing is a deft and remarkably prescient account of his journey in 1960 from London to his birthplace, the Caribbean island of Trinidad.

V. S. Naipaul is a reader-friendly introduction to the writing of one of the most influential contemporary authors and the 2001 Nobel laureate in Literature. Bruce King provides a novel by novel analysis of the fiction with attention to structure, significance, and Naipaul's development as a writer, while setting the texts in their autobiographical. philosophical, social, political, colonial and postcolonial contexts. King shows how Naipaul modified Western and Indian literary traditions for the West Indies and then the wider world to become an international writer whose subject matter includes the Caribbean, England, India, Africa, the United States, Argentina, and contemporary Islam. Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of V. S. Naipaul now includes an expanded Introduction, and discussion of his most recent novels A Way in the World and Half a Life, his Nobel Lecture, Naipaul's writings on Islam, and a survey of the main criticism by other writers and postcolonial theorists.

In his long-awaited, vastly innovative new novel, Naipaul, "one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angles Times), spans continents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiography and a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian… a brilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life and work."—New York Times.