The Novels of Samuel Selvon

The author of such works as A Brighter Sun (1952) The Lonely Londoners (1956) and The Plains of Caroni (1970) West Indian novelist Samuel Selvon is attracting growing amounts of scholarly attention. Nonetheless criticism of his works has largely been imbalanced with most scholarship focusing primarily on his language. This book corrects that imbalance by placing Selvon''s novels within historical sociological and ideological contexts. A new interpretation of Selvon''s achievement as a novelist the volume looks for the first time at his works in terms of categories of novels--peasant middle-class and immigrant.The book demonstrates that each category is different from the others and that novels within categories are similar. Thus it provides a coherent vision of Selvon''s canon. It illustrates as well the development of Selvon''s philosophy of West Indians as peasant bourgeois and immigrant. In doing so it explores the significance of ethnicity in his works and discusses Selvon''s imaginative apotheosis of the Indo-Trinidadian peasant and the diminution of the Afro-Trinidadian immigrant. The volume also studies Selvon''s fictional and rhetorical techniques and argues that his works range from Bildungsroman to picaresque to epic to satire.