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This work is a sedulous enquiry into the intertextual practice of Maryse Condé in Moi, Tituba, sorcière... noire de Salem (1986), Traversée de la mangrove (1989) and La Migration des coeurs (1995), the texts of her oeuvre in which the practice is the most elaborate and discursively significant. Arguing that no satisfactory reading of these novels is possible without due intertextual reference and interpretation, the author analyses salient intertexts which flesh out and, in the case of Traversée de la mangrove, shed considerable new light on meaning and authorial discourse. Whether it be in respect of canonical (William Faulkner, Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne), postcolonial (Aimé Césaire, Jacques Roumain) or other (Anne Hébert, Saint-John Perse) writers, the author explores Condé's intertextual choices not only around such themes as identity, resistance, métissage and errance, but also through the dialectics of race-culture, male-female, centre-periphery, and past-present. As both textual symbol and enactment of an increasingly creolised world, intertextuality constitutes a pervasively powerful force in Condé's writing the elucidation of which is indispensable to evaluating the significance of this unique fictional oeuvre.
List of contents
Contents: Female Resistance in Moi, Tituba, sorcière... noire de Salem - Challenging Race and Convention in Traversée de la mangrove - Creolising the Text in Traversée de la mangrove - Intertextual Inscription in Traversée de la mangrove - Decolonising the Text in La Migration des coeurs.
About the author
The Author: Derek O'Regan is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where he studied French and History, and of the National University of Ireland, St Patrick's College. Formerly a staff member of the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, Martinique, he now teaches twentieth-century French literature at the Paris Center for Critical Studies.
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«This complex and insightful study is an accomplished contribution to francophone Caribbean literary analysis and postcolonial discourse, with additional interdisciplinary appeal; it is of great interest to specialists and students of Condé, whilst also providing excellent information for those interested in the large body of other texts discussed.» (Louise Hardwick, Francophone Studies)
