Slaves to Sweetness

Dr Carl Plasa is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University. Previous books include 'Textual Politics from Slavery to Postcolonialism: Race and Identification' (Palgrave, 2000), 'Toni Morrison: Beloved', Columbia Critical Guides Series (Columbia University Press, 1999) and 'The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison' (co-edited with Betty J. Ring, Routledge, 1994).

Slaves to Sweetness is an important addition to the fields of postcolonial studies and of contemporary black writing: indeed, one of the most important connections it makes is to link them. Rich in perceptive close reading and razor-sharp insight, this is an important addition to the reading of all these texts, but also to the ‘reading’ of sugar.The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 61, No. 249

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. ‘Muse Suppress the tale’: James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane and the poetry of refinement2. ‘Stained with Spots of Human Blood’: Sugar, abolition and cannibalism3. ‘Conveying away the Trash’: Sweetening Slavery in Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor, kept during a residence in the Island of Jamaica4. ‘Sugared almonds and pink Lozenges’: George Eliot’s ‘Brother Jacob’ as Literary Confection5. ‘Cane is a Slaver’: Sugar Men and Sugar Women in postcolonial Caribbean poetry6. ‘Daughters Sacrificed to Strangers’: Interracial desires and intertextual memories in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge7. ‘Somebody Kill Somebody, Then?’: The sweet revenge of Austin Clarke’s The Polished HoeBibliographyIndex