This volume is a tribute to Guyana's brilliant novelist, Wilson Harris, and to the remarkable fictions he has created in the last thirty years. It includes poems dedicated to him, interview and essays which reflect the present state of Harrisian studies. They throw light on the metaphysical and critical issues in Harris's work, which underpin much post-colonial criticism and theory, and they throw new light on practically all the novels from Palace of the Peacock to his latest trilogy, Carnival, The Infinite Rehearsal and The Four Banks of the River of Space.

Together, the novels of the trilogy represent one of the most remarkable fictional achievements in the modern canon. Or rather alongside it, for much of Harris's power comes of his ability to use literature - notably Dante and Eliot, but also his own earlier work - as a means of purging literature of its [...] ritual properties [...]. The miracle is the extent to which, even at his usual fantastic level of abstraction, he can visualise the contents of a culture and hus demystify it. Reading him is like emerging from amnesia.

Brian Morton, The Listener

Table of contents

Foreword

Poems

Margaret HARRIS, Kathleen RAINE, David DABYDEEN, Michael THORPE, Fred d'AGUIAR

Conversation Pieces

Kirsten Holst PETERSEN and Anna RUTHERFORD:
Intimations of the Stranger

Michael GILKES
The Landscape of Dreams

Michel FABRE
Recovering Precious Words: On Wilson Harris and the Language of Imagination

Critical Dialogues

Mark WILLIAMS and Alan RIACH
Reading Wilson Harris

Gareth GRIFFITHS
Post-Colonial Space and Time: Wilson Harris and Caribbean Criticism

Stephen SLEMON
Wilson Harris and the 'Subject' of Realism

Joyce Sparer ADLER
Harris's Cross-Cultural Dialogue with Melville

Russell MCDOUGALL
'Corporeal Music': The Scale of Myth and Adjectival Insistence in Palace of the Peacock

Gregory SHAW
Time of the Tiger

Nathaniel MACKEY
Poseidon (Dub Version)

Helen TIFFIN
'Retrace My Steps': Heartland, Heart of Darkness, and Post-Colonial Counter-Discourse

Louis JAMES
The Theatre of Painted Rock: A Reading of Tumatumari

Mark A. McWATT
'A Late Dazzle of Sun': Aspects of Wilson Harris's Comic Vision in Black Marsden

Alan RIACH
The Scottish Element in Black Marsden

Mary Lou EMERY
Reading 'W. H.': Draft of an Incomplete Conversation

William J. HOWARD
The Reformation Process in Da Silva da Silva's Cultivated Wilderness and Genesis of the Clowns

Al CREIGHTON
The Human Comedy: Carnival and The Infinite Rehearsal

Desmond HAMLET
Sustaining the Vision: Wilson Harris and the Uncompromising Imagination

Jean-Pierre DURIX
The Palimpsest of Fiction: The Infinite Rehearsal

Michael N. JAGESSAR: Wilson Harris, the Imagination and the 'Infinite Rehearsal': A Theological Perspective

Hena MAES-JELINEK
'Unfinished Genesis': The Four Banks of the River of Space

Bibliography

Marc DELREZ and Hena MAES-JELINEK

Notes on Contributors