The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen-Thirties

Sander … presents a definitive, thoroughly researched, gracefully expressed study of literary activity in Trinidad in the 1930s, and its literary/cultural implications for West Indian literature in general… . In Caribbean literary studies, Sander’s work is pioneering in its drawing of successful links between cultural productions and historical realities. The book’s organization is clear and logical; its accessibility enhanced by a well-documented index.

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This is the first comprehensive history of the Trinidadian literature that paved the way for the emergence over the past forty years of many major West Indian literary works. Sander contends that the sporadic nature of literary output in the island before the late 1920s can be explained in part as the consequence of Trinidad’s linguistic diversity and its rapidly changing patterns of settlement. Until 1797 Trinidad had been a Spanish colony, with a large proportion of French-speaking inhabitants, and it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that English became more widely spoken. The burst of creative activity in the late 1920s was related to the new ascendancy of English and the fact that the society had begun to resolve itself into well-defined racial, social, and economic groupings.