Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole (1838) is a novel by Edward Lanzer Joseph. Published in the last year of Joseph's life, the novel claims to be an edited version of the memoirs of Warner Arundell, a Creole lawyer and doctor from Grenada. A common literary trope of the time, this grants a modicum of authority to the author while maintaining his distance from events that may have been drawn from his own experiences. Believed to be the first novel set in Trinidad, Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole is a groundbreaking work of Caribbean literature that continues to inform readers of the Creole experience in the Americas. "As we entered the town, I was absolutely rendered giddy by the opulence and grandeur of the shops, the thronging of the population, and the deafening noise; while the smoky atmosphere, unlike aught I ever before beheld, weighed down my spirits." When an encounter with fraudulent lawyers leaves him penniless, he travels to Venezuela and England to study law and medicine before returning to the New World in search of fortune. Along the way, he embarks on several adventures, meets the African-descended side of his family, and falls in love with a beautiful Venezuelan woman. Originally written to shed light on the "many abuses in [the] West Indian Colonial System," the novel has since been recognized as a pioneering work of Caribbean literature which continues to inform the postcolonial perspective on race, class, and identity in the British colonial era. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Edward Lanzer Joseph's Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole is a classic of Caribbean literature reimagined for modern readers.

Situated opposite the mouth of the Orinoco River, western Trinidad has long been considered an entrepot to mainland South America. Trinidad's geographic position - seen as strategic by various imperial governments - led to many heterogeneous peoples from across the region and globe settling or being relocated there. The calm waters around the Gulf of Paria on the western fringes of Trinidad induced settlers to construct a harbour, Port of Spain, around which the modern capital has been formed. From its colonial roots into the postcolonial era, western Trinidad therefore has played an especial part in the shaping of the island's literature. Viewed from one perspective, western Trinidad might be deemed as narrating the heart of the modern state's national literature. Alternatively, the political threats posed around San Fernando in Trinidad's southwest in the 1930s and from within the capital in the 1970s present a different picture of western Trinidad - one in which the fractures of Trinidad and Tobago's projected nationalism are prevalent. While sugar remains a dominant narrative in Caribbean literary studies, this book offers a unique literary perspective on matters too often perceived as the sole preserve of sociological, anthropological or geographical studies. The legacy of the oil industry and the development of the suburban commuter belt of East-West Corridor, therefore, form considerable discursive nodes, alongside other key Trinidadian sites, such as Woodford Square, colonial houses and the urban yards of Port of Spain. This study places works by well-known authors such as V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon, alongside writing by Michel Maxwell Philip, Marcella Fanny Wilkins, E. L. Joseph, Earl Lovelace, Ismith Khan, Monique Roffey, Arthur Calder-Marshall, Zenga Longmore and the largely neglected novelist, Yseult Bridges, who is almost entirely forgotten today. Using fiction, calypso, history, memoir, legal accounts, poetry, essays and journalism, this study opens with an analysis of Trinidad's nineteenth century literature and offers twentieth century and more contemporary readings of the island in successive chapters. Chapters are roughly arranged in chronological order around particular sites and topoi, while literature from a variety of authors of British, Caribbean, Irish and Jewish descent is represented.

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This volume examines what Caribbean literature looked like before 1920 by surveying the print culture of the period. The emphasis is on narrative, including an enormous range of genres, in varying venues, and in multiple languages of the Caribbean. Essays examine lesser-known authors and writing previously marginalized as nonliterary: popular writing in newspapers and pamphlets; fiction and poetry such as romances, sentimental novels, and ballads; non-elite memoirs and letters, such as the narratives of the enslaved or the working classes, especially women. Many contributions are comparative, multilingual, and regional. Some infer the cultural presence of subaltern groups within the texts of the dominant classes. Almost all of the chapters move easily between time periods, linking texts, writers, and literary movements in ways that expand traditional notions of literary influence and canon formation. Using literary, cultural, and historical analyses, this book provides a complete re-examination of early Caribbean literature.