Article (Scientific journals)
Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child: A Story of Loss and Connection
Ledent, Bénédicte; O'Callaghan, Evelyn
2017In Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 48 (3&4), p. 229-247
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Keywords :
Caryl Phillips; The Lost Child; Intertextuality
Abstract :
[en] Through a reading of Caryl Phillips’ most recent novel, The Lost Child (2015), this article examines a paradox at the heart of Phillips’ work: the tension between the ruptures and continuities brought about by the historical encounter of north and south (specifically, eighteenth-century northern Britain and the Caribbean). The novel focuses on the lot of the lost children who were born in the wake of such a fateful meeting and whose narratives are often missing from the literary and historical records even as their ghostly traces haunt today’s British society and indeed the British literary canon. Yet, as this essay demonstrates, the family disruptions and sense of loss, a legacy of slavery that mars the lives of the characters, are compensated at the fictional level by a form of literary parenthood. The novel relies on a fruitful intertextual conversation with other novels that, like The Lost Child, invest in the narrative reclamation of absent stories, the unvoiced accounts of orphans and lost, stolen, or denied children of the Empire. These texts include Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) as well as Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and some of Phillips’ earlier works, notably Cambridge (1991).
Research center :
CEREP - Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherche en Études Postcoloniales - ULiège
Disciplines :
Literature
Author, co-author :
Ledent, Bénédicte  ;  Université de Liège > Département de langues et littératures modernes > Langue et linguistique anglaises modernes
O'Callaghan, Evelyn;  University of the West Indies
Language :
English
Title :
Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child: A Story of Loss and Connection
Publication date :
2017
Journal title :
Ariel: A Review of International English Literature
ISSN :
0004-1327
eISSN :
1920-1222
Publisher :
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, United States
Volume :
48
Issue :
3&4
Pages :
229-247
Peer reviewed :
Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi
Available on ORBi :
since 20 December 2016

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