Writing in the Key of Life is the first critical collection devoted to the British-Caribbean author Caryl Phillips, a major voice in contemporary anglophone literatures. Phillips’s impressive body of fiction, drama, and non-fiction has garnered wide praise for its formal inventiveness and its incisive social criticism as well as its unusually sensitive understanding of the human condition. 

The twenty-six contributions offered here, including two by Phillips himself, address the fundamental issues that have preoccupied the writer in his now three-decades-long career – the enduring legacy of history, the intricate workings of identity, and the pervasive role of race, class, and gender in societies worldwide. 

Most of Phillips’s writing is covered here, in essays that approach it from various thematic and interpretative angles. These include the interplay of fact and fiction, Phillips’s sometimes ambiguous literary affiliations, his long-standing interest in the black and Jewish diasporas, his exploration of Britain and its ‘Others’, and his recurrent use of motifs such as masking and concealment. 

Writing in the Key of Life testifies to the vitality of Phillipsian scholarship and confirms the significance of an artist whose concerns, at once universal and topical, find particular resonance with the state of the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction
Bénédicte LEDENT and Daria TUNCA

I CARYL PHILLIPS: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF WRITING

Oxford
Peter MARSDEN

Preamble
Caryl PHILLIPS

Colour Me English
Caryl PHILLIPS

Caryl Phillips and the Question of Political Identity: Wrestling with Prejudice
Kirpal SINGH

II CRITICAL ESSAYS

AUTOBIOGRAPHY, FACT, AND FICTION

Conversations with Caryl Phillips: Reflections upon an Intellectual Life
Renée SCHATTEMAN

Plural Selves: The Dispersion of the Autobiographical Subject in the Essays of Caryl Phillips
Louise YELIN

“Look liberty in the face”: Determinism and Free Will in Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners: Three English Lives
Bénédicte LEDENT

Hybrid Inventiveness: Caryl Phillips’s Black Atlantic Subjectivity – The European Tribe and The Atlantic Sound
Joan MILLER POWELL

CARYL PHILLIPS AND THE OTHER WRITERS

Vido, not Sir Vidia: Caryl Phillips’s Encounters with V.S. Naipaul
John MCLEOD

A New World’s Twilight: Ethics of the Caribbean Writer in Caryl Phillips’s and Derek Walcott’s Essays
Malik FERDINAND

Caryl Phillips’s “Heartland” and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Revisiting Fear – An Intertextual Approach
Imen NAJAR

DIASPORAS

Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and Cross-Cultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood
Stef CRAPS

Bidirectional Revision: The Connection between Past and Present in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River
Fatim BOUTROS

“The cloud of ambivalence”: Exploring Diasporan Identity in Caryl Phillips’s The Atlantic Sound and A New World Order
Abigail WARD

Caryl Phillips’s Seascapes of the Imaginary
Wendy KNEPPER

The Dis-ease of Multiple Identities: The Nature of Diasporan Identity in Caryl Phillips’s Strange Fruit
Chika UNIGWE

BRITAIN AND ITS ‘OTHERS’

A New World Tribe in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore
Alessandra DI MAIO

Dorothy’s Heart of Darkness: How Europe Meets Africa in A Distant Shore
Sandra COURTMAN

Negotiating Inclusion in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore
Thomas BONNICI

Strange Encounters: Nationhood and the Stranger in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore
Petra TOURNAY–THEODOTOU

The Civilized Pretence: Caryl Phillips and A Distant Shore
Cindy GABRIELLE

RACE AND MASKS

Omnipresent and Everlasting Imperialism: Race and Gender Oppression in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and A Distant Shore
Lucie GILLET

The Dilemma of a Black Entertainer: A Contextualized Reading of Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark
Tsunehiko KATO

The Mask and the Unheimlich in Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark
Itala VIVAN

Concentric and Centripetal Narratives of Race: Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark and Percival Everett’s Erasure
Dave GUNNING

The Dynamic of Revelation and Concealment: In the Falling Snow and the Narrational Architecture of Blighted Existences
Gordon COLLIER

Notes on Contributors

Index