From Blurring to Transcending: Emily’s Epiphany and Shaping of Community of Shared Future in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge

Abstract

Caryl Phillips (1958-), a leading novelist in Contemporary British literature is acclaimed as one of the best-known and most talented Black British writers of his West Indian generation. Cambridge, his fourth novel and regarded as the most Caribbean and universal novel, has garnered flowering acclaims at home and abroad since publication in 1991. The article elaborates on the implications of Emily’s epiphany from muti-perspectives framed within the framework of epiphany. Through a systematic study of Emily’s epiphany, it is to point out the refreshing implications, namely, the affinities between the colonizers and the colonized, blur the epistemic boundaries and further indicate that through blurring and transcending boundaries, mutual empathy and telepathy could be evoked among people from different social hierarchies with a community of shared future for mankind shaped.