Literature
Jamaican Thomas MacDermot is credited for fostering the creation of Jamaican literature, and his Becka's Buckra Baby (Becka’s Buckra Baby available openly and freely online from the Digital Library of the Caribbean) as the beginning of modern Caribbean literature. Jamaican Claude McKay is credited with inspiring France's Negritude (“Blackness”) movement, as well as being a founding father of the Harlem Renaissance. Having established himself as a poet in Jamaica, he moved to the U.S. in his 20s and proceeded to travel to France, but never returned to his birthplace.
McKay is not the only Jamaican poet, Una Marson was well known for her poetry and her activism as a feminist, and Louise Bennett-Coverly is another Jamaican poet known for her unique voice. Similarly, St. Lucian Nobel prize winner, Derek Walcott, studied at the University in Jamaica. Other writers who have recently gained acclaim in Jamaica are Hazel Dorothy Campbell and the late Mikey Smith.
The island's local dialect has become an important element to their literature and other arts. The speech style is particularly notable in poetry or in prose's dialogue.
Read more about this topic: Jamaican Literature
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign,—is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.”
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“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)