'Rewriting' in the context of critical work on Caribbean literature has tended to be used to discuss revisionism from a variety of postcolonial perspectives, such as 'rewriting history' or 'rewriting canonical texts.' By shifting the focus to how Caribbean writers return to their own works in order to rework them, this book offers theoretical considerations to postcolonial studies on 'literariness' in relation to the near-obsessive degree of rewriting to which Caribbean writers have subjected their own literary texts. Focusing specifically on FrankZtienne, this book offers an overview of how the defining aesthetic and thematic components of FrankZtienne's major works have emerged over the course of his forty-year writing career. It reveals the marked development of key notions guiding his literary creation since the 1960s, and demonstrates that rewriting illustrates the central aesthetic of the Spiral which has always shaped his Iuvre. It is, the book argues, the constantly moving form of the Spiral which FrankZtienne explores through his constant reworking of his previously written texts. FrankZtienne and Rewriting negotiates between the literary and material ends of the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies, arguing that literary characteristics in FrankZtienne connect with changing political, social, economic, and cultural circumstances in the Haiti he rewrites.

Broaching the notion of the 'frame' from a variety of analytic perspectives, and employing a range of approaches, this collection of articles engages with contemporary debates on text and image relations, literary reception and translation, narratology and cinematographic technique. The various contributions to this collection provide new readings in their respective fields, and share a common concern with exploring the productive and problematic notion of the 'frame' and of 'framing' in a wide variety of cultural media in French Studies. This interdisciplinary analysis of literary and theoretical texts, visual art and film allows for fruitful connections to be made at the level of analysis of themes and of methodology. It thus provides material that is of interest both to specialists in these fields, and also to those seeking a more general introduction to each area. This collection of articles is selected from the proceedings of the 'Framed! in French Studies' workshop, held at the Institut Français in London in February 2006.

Dézafi is no ordinary zombie novel. In the hands of the great Haitian author known simply as Frankétienne, zombification takes on a symbolic dimension that stands as a potent commentary on a country haunted by a history of slavery. Now this dynamic new translation brings this touchstone in Haitian literature—the first book ever published in Haitian Creole—to English-language readers for the first time. Written in a provocative experimental style, with a myriad of voices and combining myth, poetry, allegory, magical realism, and social realism, Dézafi tells the tale of a plantation that is run and worked by zombies for the financial benefit of the living owner. The owner's daughter falls in love with a zombie and facilitates his transformation back into fully human form, leading to a rebellion that challenges the oppressive imbalance that had robbed the workers of their spirit. With the walking dead and bloody cockfights (the "dézafi" of the title) as cultural metaphors for Haitian existence, Frankétienne’s novel is ultimately a powerful allegory of political and social liberation.

Hip hop is a global form of creative expression. In Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti, rappers refuse the boundaries of hip hop’s US genesis, claiming the art form as a means to empower themselves and their communities in the face of postcolonial racial and class violence. Despite the geographic and linguistic borders that separate these artists, Charlie Hankin finds in their music and lyrics a common understanding of hip hop’s capacity to intervene in the public sphere and a shared poetics of neighborhood, nation, and transatlantic yearnings. Situated at the critical intersection of sound studies and Afro-diasporic poetics, Break and Flow draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork and collaboration, as well as an archive of hundreds of songs by more than sixty hip hop artists. Hankin illuminates how new media is used to produce and distribute knowledge in the Global South, refining our understanding of poetry and popular music at the turn of the millennium.

The first biography of one of Georgian England's most notorious figures, who thrived on scandal, fracas, and the cultivation of notoriety. Despite this he managed to make contributions to diverse fields, including botany, geology, literature, medicine and the professionalization of science, whose value has stood the test of time. Hill appears here in the company of other illuminati such as Samuel Johnson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Christopher Smart, Linnaeus, Haller and the Fellows of the Royal Society.

A biography of the great America poet draws upon a broad range of sources and quotes liberally from Whitman's poetry to discuss his many jobs, his sexual fluidity, his solitariness, and his work.

In this book, Roy Pateman provides the most reader-friendly, up to date biography of B. Traven, an enigmatic writer whose readership spread across broader class, race, and language divides more than anyone else writing during the twentieth century. This unconventional biography discusses Traven's alternative histories, followed by an attempt to find out the major influences of this elusive man. Pateman addresses Traven's politics, his life of humanist anarchism, and discusses all of his works (in English and German), emphasizing The Death Ship, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and the "Jungle Sextet." Also included is a chronology of Traven's life, which is fuller than that found in any other study. The book ends with a modest solution to the intractable problem of who Traven really was and where he was born and raised.