Writing genre, writing resistance

Abstract

This dissertation looks at the strategies that have been undertaken by Anglophone Caribbean poets seeking to revise the history of the Caribbean through genre. I consider how texts written in literary genres respond to particular historical and social exigencies by co-opting antecedent colonial genres in ways that transgress them. In doing so, I take up questions from Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) that ask whether a theory of social action might be applied to literary works, and place Caribbean history and cultural studies in conversation with sociolinguistics and genre theory in literature and RGS. Using the poetry collections of Olive Senior, Kei Miller and Linton Kwesi Johnson as case studies, I argue that West Indian poetry pushes the theoretical envelope of literary analysis and invites an approach that incorporates rhetorical genre theory - specifically Carolyn Miller's theory of genre as social action and Anne Freadman's theory of uptake-to unearth the full potential of the text.