Making Subject(s): Literature and the Emergence of National Identity.(Review)

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-SEP-00

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ALLEN CAREY-WEBB. Making Subject(s): Literature and the Emergence of National Identity. Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Volume 4. New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1998. Pp. xiv + 242. $55.00.

Carey-Webb's book is a piece of cultural research which studies how literary texts construct authority and subjectivity. The book is organized in two parts plus a theoretical introduction. In the first part Carey-Webb writes about seventeenth-century European theater, comparing Lope de Vega's El nuevo mundo descubierto pot Cristobal Colon and Shakespeare's The Tempest. The second part addresses the twentieth-century third world novel, with one chapter about Les bouts de bois de Dieu by the Senegalese Ousmane Sembene, and the other about Midnight's Children by the Indian Salman Rushdie. Working with a very heterogeneous group of texts, he uses different theoretical approaches in order to understand the links between them. The final result is both...

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