Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

 

Acosta, Ana M. Reading Genesis in the Long Eighteenth Century: From Milton to

Mary Shelley (Aldershot : Ashgate, 2006)

Acosta is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, at Brooklyn College—CUNY. This book is an exegesis into the two versions of Genesis separated by the differing ways in which the name for ‘G-d’ was expressed in Hebrew. She then goes into an account of how both chapters were not secularized, but served as narrative, utopian, and ideological structures to many writers of the long eighteenth century. Acosta focuses on the work of Milton, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley as examples.

Aviezer, Nathan. In the Beginning...Biblical Creation and Science (Hoboken, N.J.: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1990)

Professor of Physics at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, Dr. Aviezer puts forward a common belief that the six days of creation are not really six, twenty-four hour days, but symbols for the longer process of evolution. Theories like the ones presented in this book are modern incarnations of the problem of reconciling biblical history to science common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Babcock, William H. Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: a Study in Medieval Geography. (Plainview, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972)

Survey of the many legends of islands that are to the west of Europe, beginning with Plato’s creation of Atlantis, to the early Viking discoveries, and the Irish legend of St. Brendan’s, and Spanish/Italian Antiglia – both which showed up on Toscanelli’s maps as far as the late fifteenth century. This book is a valuable aid in constructing European attitudes and expectations for the ‘New World’ and its inhabitants.

Bailey, James. Toward a Statistical Analysis of English Verse : the Iambic

Tetrameter of Ten Poets (Lisse, Netherlands: The Peter de Ridder Press, 1975)

This book in an application of the Russian linguistic-statistical method to the verse of Jonson, Milton, Pope, Cowper, Blake, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Eliot, Auden, and Graves, who all utilized the tetrameter. Hiroona is also written in tetrameter, so I am looking at this to help analyze Huggins’s use of rhythm in English metrics.

Brown, Lloyd W. West Indian Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1984)

Brown was Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He refers to the first one hundred and fifty years of West Indian poetry, beginning with James Grainger all the way to 1940, as “unpromising,” citing Claude McKay as the only major poet to emerge from that time.

Burnet, Thomas. The Theory of the Earth: Containing an Account of the Original of the Earth, and of All the General Changes Which it Hath Already Undergone, or is to Undergo Till the Consummation of All Things (London: R. Norton, for Walter Kettilby, 1691)

The dedication to this early work of geology, which was first published in Latin ten years earlier as Telluris Theoria Sacra (Sacred Theory of the Earth), refers to the discovery of the “New-found Lands and Countries” of recent. Burnet then goes into twelve chapters that attempt to explain the origins of the earth and a rational explanation for Noah’s flood. This is a very central concept, I believe, to the development of early Imperial ideology.

Cro, Stelio - The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom (Waterloo,Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990)

Cro, Professor of Spanish at King College, Bristol TN, argues that the noble savage was Rousseau’s most original creation, and that it was presented as a referential allegory – an alternative to “tyranny, feudalism, despotism, debauchery, luxury…” and proceeds to list a number of references to this allegory, from the writings of Vico, Montaigne, Peter Martyr, Voltaire to literary works such as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.

Fairchild, Hoxie Neale. The Noble Savage: A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York, Columbia University Press, 1928)

Although this study was written eighty years ago, the central concepts therein are important references for the purposes of my argument. Fairchild connects the development of the Noble Savage idea to the Romantic literary desire to find the supernatural within the natural. This work is also important because Fairchild includes the African (and African slave) in his definition of Noble Savage – which is an important footnote when considering Huggins’s interpretations of the Black Caribs.

Huckerby, Thomas. “Petroglyphs of St. Vincent, British West Indies.” American Anthropologist. 16:2 (April-June 1914) 238-244.

Reverend Huckerby was an Anglican priest ministering in Château Belair, St. Vincent and friend of Hovey. This article starts out with the false statement that St. Vincent was discovered on 22 January, 1498, a myth that was acknowledged since before Huggins set out to write Hiroona. Despite this, the article is a discussion of the discovery of prehistoric petroglyphs, or pictographs, found incised, both deeply and shallowly into large rocks, and in caves in the areas of Barrouallie, Rutland Vale, Petit Bordel, Layou, and scattered around the island in many other places.

Labat, Jean-Baptiste. Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amerique : contenant l’histoire naturelle... l’origine, les mœurs, la religion & le gouvernement des habitans anciens & modernes (La Haye : Chez P. Husson, T. Johnson, P. Gosse et al., 1724)

Père Labat was a Dominican friar, engineer, and landowner who travelled to the West Indies for a number of purposes during the early eighteenth century. Although his studies are based on highly racist premises, he takes great care to provide an ethnographic study of Carib culture and society.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among

Men (1755). Trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1984)

The ideas and illustrations presented in this work are said to be the foundation for many notions of the Noble Savage from the eighteenth century onward. Although I believe this to be partly true (the Noble Savage existed long before in the writings of early explorers), Rousseau inspired many other authors who would not have been exposed to a paradigm that ultimately has negative effects on Caribbean identity. Rousseau’s central argument here is to show how men of society, though the acquisition of knowledge, have removed themselves farther away from their original, primitive, yet self-knowing state. The savage man (the native Amerindians), who he continually contrasts to the civilized man, holds a place closer to his true nature.