Emily Greenwood
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199575244
- eISBN:
- 9780191722189
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199575244.003.0002
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
The starting point for this chapter is Antonio Benítez‐Rojo's concept of the ‘path of words’ to explain the repetition of motifs in travel writers who undertake the same journeys. This repetitive ...
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The starting point for this chapter is Antonio Benítez‐Rojo's concept of the ‘path of words’ to explain the repetition of motifs in travel writers who undertake the same journeys. This repetitive path of words is an important route for the introduction of classical motifs into modern Caribbean literature. The chapter studies the constant return to Greece in Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Traveller's Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (1950), and contrasts Fermor's neo‐Hellenic analogies with J. A. Froude's notorious Homeric analogy in The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses (1887). One of the legacies of these travel accounts is that the Caribbean is represented as an accident of Greece, a curious ‘other’ Mediterranean. Since both Froude and Fermor's accounts appeal to Homer's Odyssey as a legitimizing text for their travel accounts, the second section explores Derek Walcott's fashioning of a New World Odyssey that writes back to Froude and Fermor, and shares tropes with other responses to The Odyssey in the Caribbean.Less
The starting point for this chapter is Antonio Benítez‐Rojo's concept of the ‘path of words’ to explain the repetition of motifs in travel writers who undertake the same journeys. This repetitive path of words is an important route for the introduction of classical motifs into modern Caribbean literature. The chapter studies the constant return to Greece in Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Traveller's Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (1950), and contrasts Fermor's neo‐Hellenic analogies with J. A. Froude's notorious Homeric analogy in The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses (1887). One of the legacies of these travel accounts is that the Caribbean is represented as an accident of Greece, a curious ‘other’ Mediterranean. Since both Froude and Fermor's accounts appeal to Homer's Odyssey as a legitimizing text for their travel accounts, the second section explores Derek Walcott's fashioning of a New World Odyssey that writes back to Froude and Fermor, and shares tropes with other responses to The Odyssey in the Caribbean.
Peter Hulme
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198112150
- eISBN:
- 9780191670688
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198112150.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 19th Century Literature
Twelve years after Jean Rhys's visit, it was from Elma Napier's house that Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to visit the Caribs. Fermor's account of his visit to the Carib Reserve was published in the ...
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Twelve years after Jean Rhys's visit, it was from Elma Napier's house that Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to visit the Caribs. Fermor's account of his visit to the Carib Reserve was published in the Geographical Magazine in 1950, and later the same year, in a slightly longer version, it formed chapter five of his The Traveller's Tree, the best-known of all travel-books about the Caribbean, and the one which sets the terms for post-war descriptions of the Caribs. For those reasons it is given some detailed consideration here as a way of introducing the main themes of this chapter, which are then pursued via rather briefer references to more recent travel writers. The Traveller's Tree has become the conduit through which the old colonial verities have passed into contemporary accounts.Less
Twelve years after Jean Rhys's visit, it was from Elma Napier's house that Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to visit the Caribs. Fermor's account of his visit to the Carib Reserve was published in the Geographical Magazine in 1950, and later the same year, in a slightly longer version, it formed chapter five of his The Traveller's Tree, the best-known of all travel-books about the Caribbean, and the one which sets the terms for post-war descriptions of the Caribs. For those reasons it is given some detailed consideration here as a way of introducing the main themes of this chapter, which are then pursued via rather briefer references to more recent travel writers. The Traveller's Tree has become the conduit through which the old colonial verities have passed into contemporary accounts.
