Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio
ISBN: 9781846319983
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Liverpool University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Language & Literature;

American Tropics' refers to a kind of extended Caribbean, an area that includes the southern USA, the Atlantic littoral of Central America, the Caribbean islands, and northern South America. European colonial powers fought intensively here against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources. The regions in the American Tropics share a history in which the dominant fact is the arrival of millions of white Europeans and black Africans; share an environment that is tropical or sub-tropical; and share a socio-economic model (the plantation), whose effects lasted at least well into the twentieth century.The imaginative space of the American Tropics therefore offers a differently centred literary history from those conventionally produced as US, Caribbean, or Latin American literature. This important collection brings together essays by distinguished scholars, including the late Neil Whitehead, Richard Price, Sally Price, and Susan Gillman, that engage with the idea of a literary geography of the American Tropics and that represent the rich diversity of the writing produced within this geographical area.


Maria Cristina Fumagalli is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex. She is the author of 'Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa's Gaze' (University of Virginia Press, 2009). Peter Hulme is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex. His most recent publication is Cuba's Wild East: A Literary Geography of Oriente (Liverpool University Press, 2011). Owen Robinson is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Essex. Lesley Wylie is Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Leicester and the author of 'Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks: Rewriting the Tropics in the novela de la selva' (Liverpool University Press, 2009).

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