| This dissertation explores the narrative construction of the West Indian Creole and the concomitant processes of creolian change from a metropole's point of view. In order to elucidate the cultural parameters that surround and inform this imperial subject, I examine representative texts which figure them and their transformed state as delightful or horrifying, degenerative or regenerative, grotesque or marvelous. The theories of modern creolization and colonial hospitality merge to form the interrogative nexus of my project, as I unearth and interrogate the settler discourse of a rapidly emergent colonial elite culture, flourishing at the ends of the empire.; My scope of chosen literature is transatlantic, as I study Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random (1748), James Grainger's West Indian georgic "The Sugar-Cane" (1764), and comparatively, Tobias Smollett's Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) and J. Hector de St. John de Crevecoeur's Letters from An American Farmer (1782). Central to my argument are questions of how these texts respond and "manage" these postcolonial others who return to their native land. This project, therefore seeks to put these eighteenth-century texts into a productive dialogue with issues of transplantation, settlement, and nationalism, as it offers an alternative history of colonial development, which is not necessarily the typically annihilative colonial script. |
