Racial Genealogies and Intertextuality in Contemporary Britain: Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to examine the different family dynamics depicted in Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child (2015). In particular, it will be demonstrated how the author exploits the trope underlying the title of the novel and a web of intertextual references to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights in order to portray the complexity and the dramatic nature of those aspects of family relationships which derive from the social and racial dynamics of nineteenth-century English society.