This volume celebrates Wilson Harris's eightieth birthday and more than fifty years of creative writing. The most original and profound writer of the Caribbean, he has revolutionized the art of fiction and its language. He has himself contributed to this volume, and several Caribbean writers of a younger generation - Cyril Dabydeen, Fred D'Aguiar, Andrew Jefferson-Miles, Mark McWatt, Caryl Phillips, Lawrence Scott - pay tribute here to his genius. The essays are by critics from the Caribbean, Britain, the United States and continental Europe who have long admired and explored his work. They cover the various genres of Harris's writing, his poetry, fiction and criticism, and deal with major aspects of his work, bringing out its relevance to the contemporary context of violence in the world, its modernity, and its contribution to the renewal of the humanities.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Hena MAES-JELINEK
Introduction: Approaching Wilson Harris's Creativity

Wilson HARRIS
Theatre of the Arts

Fred D'AGUIAR
Love for the Vanished: Wilson Harris on Love

Cyril DABYDEEN
On Knowing Wilson Harris

Cyril DABYDEEN
Amerindians

Lawrence SCOTT
Poems (Last August; Mayaro; Hingwan Style; Afterthought)

Caryl PHILLIPS
Wilson Harris

Caryl PHILLIPS
The Gift of Displacement

Peter STUMMER
For Wilson Harris on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday

Gordon COLLIER
Revisiting Eternity to Season

Paula BURNETT
Opening New Doors: A Glimpse of Wilson Harris and Derek Walcott

Jean-Pierre DURIX
Origins in Palace of the Peacock

Louis JAMES
Fenwick's Log: Reading the "Text of Landscape" in The Secret Ladder

Mary Lou EMERY
The Poetics of Vision in Wilson Harris's Writing

Mark McWATT
"Omens of Humanity": World Texts and Contexts in Wilson Harris's Critical Writings

Vera M. KUTZINSKI
Wilson Harris's Phantom Bodies: Re-Reading the Subject

Michael MITCHELL
The Magus at Angel Inn

Stuart MURRAY
Wilson Harris in his Essays at the End of the Millennium: Time, Countertime, Writing

Andrew JEFFERSON-MILES
Quantum Value in Wilson Harris's "architecture of the tides"

Dominique DUBOIS
The Redemptive Power of Bone's Revisionary Fiction

Samuel DURRANT
Coming Home "upon threads of desolation": The Reversal of Prophecy in Wilson Harris's The Dark Jester

Hena MAES-JELINEK
"Unimaginable imaginer": The Dark Jester

Round Table
Wilson Harris and Fred D'Aguiar in conversation with Gordon Rohlehr

Contributors

List of Participants