Marina Warner, Indigo, or Mapping the Waters

Jennifer Dunn (University of Oxford)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Gina Lyle (University of York), Graham MacPhee (University of Manchester), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1992

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

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Indigo, or, Mapping the Waters

(1992) is richly intertextual, taking inspiration, foremost, from Shakespeare’s

The Tempest

and Marina Warner’s own family history. The text’s structure is complex, a palimpsest of oral and written narratives, letters, and epigraphs taken from European and Caribbean literature. The main narrative is composed of two stories, moving between seventeenth-century Liamuiga, a Caribbean island, and twentieth-century Europe and Enfant-Béate. Liamuiga and its sister isle Oualie form the colony of Enfant-Béate, and are based on the real islands of St. Kitts and Nevis. In 1623-24, Captain Thomas Warner, the author’s ancestor, established Britain’s first Caribbean colony on St. Kitts. Legend holds that a slave-wife in love with Warner warned him of an…

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2926 words

Citation: Dunn, Jennifer. "Indigo, or Mapping the Waters". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 April 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4448, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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Marina Warner, Indigo, or Mapping the Waters

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