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Soon Come Home to This Island traces the representation of West Indian characters in British children's literature from 1700 to today. This book challenges traditional notions of British children's literature as mono-cultural by illuminating the contributions of colonial and postcolonial-era Black British writers. The author examines the varying depictions of West Indian islands and peoples in a wide range of picture books, novels, textbooks, and popular periodicals published over the course of more than 300 years. An excellent resource for any children's literature student or scholar, the book includes a chronological bibliography of primary source material that includes West Indian characters and twenty black-and-white illustrations that chart the changes in visual representations of West Indians over time.
List of contents
Series Editor’s Foreword
Preface: Soon Come Home
1. This Island for England: Early Depictions of the West Indies
2. The Black Man’s Lament: Enlisting Child Readers in the Fight over Slavery
3. A Small Corner of the Empire: The West Indies in Literature of the Victorian Era
4. School on an Island: Geographies, School Stories, and Comics in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
5. The Winds of Change: The West Indian Comes to Britain
6. Happy Families?: British Picture Books After 1970
7. This Island for Me: Black British Writers
Conclusion: The Avenging Caribbean
Works Cited
Index
About the author
Karen Sands-O'Connor is Associate Professor of English at Buffalo State College in Buffalo, New York where she teaches children's and twentieth century British literature. She is co-author, with Marietta Frank, of Back in theSpaceship Again: Juvenile Science Fictions Series since1945 (1999).
Summary
Soon Come Home to This Island traces the representation of West Indian characters in British children's literature from 1700 to today, challenging traditional notions of British children's literature as mono-cultural by illuminating the contributions of colonial and postcolonial-era Black British writers.
