‘Ritorni’. Diaspora e romanzo di formazione nella narrativa di matrice caraibica della seconda metà del ’900 in Gran Bretagna

This thesis examines novels of development by writers of Caribbean origin and descent from the 1950s to the 1990s with special focus on diasporic authors based in the UK. It examines the transformation of the tòpos of return in a corpus of Bildungsromane by writers who migrated to Britain after 1948, by late migrants who followed in the 1970s, and eventually by British born or British raised authors of Caribbean descent (chapter 1). The Caribbean background, which is prevalent in the novels of the ’50s, still plays a relevant role in later works of the ’80s and ’90s as new forms of discoursively constructed Caribbean emerge inside representations of a heterogeneous Britishness. The concept of diaspora provides a useful heuristic tool to investigate a literary production that problematises the notion of ‘home’ and conventional binaries such as ‘exile’/’home’, displacement/belonging. The applicability of the term Bildungsroman to the texts of the corpus is discussed in chapter 2. Using a methodology that combines genre theory, narratology and contextualization, it is argued that the Bildungsroman has been critically appropriated and creolized to represent the intricacies of a diasporic identity in a colonial and postcolonial context. Novels by George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Andrew Salkey, Erna Brodber, Joan Riley, Andrea Levy, and David Dabydeen are presented as exemplary case studies (chapters 3,4,5). The texts are read as counterdiscoursive revisions of the Bildungsroman.