This book brings together articles and book chapters written over the last twenty years. They cover different types of writing – mainly fiction, but also essays and articles, and literary manifestoes; they also vary widely in scope, from readings of one particular text to more general studies of literary genres or movements. But they all share a common focus on the linguistic and/or formal aspects of literary texts.

Part I looks at issues of genre, intertextuality and discourse in relation to a number of French Caribbean writers. The first three chapters are all concerned with the reactions of French Caribbean writers to the ways in which they are seen by European audiences: the problems of asserting difference without lapsing into the stereotypes of exoticism. Thus chapter 1 analyses the ambiguous relationship to primitivism of the review Tropiques in the 1940s, in the context of French surrealism, African-American literature and European ethnography. Chapter 2 continues this concern with genre in the phenomenon of ‘auto-exoticism’ – the internalization and reproduction by French Caribbean writers of the colonial other's exotic vision of their culture – as diagnosed by René Ménil in the 1950s and then, thirty years later, treated rather differently by Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant; this also involves issues of language, in the latters’ promotion of Creole over French and their emphasis on integrating distinctively oral language into literary texts. Chapter 3 focuses more directly on the reception of French Caribbean literature by metropolitan readers, exploring the oddly literalized notion of consumption that is used to market this literature – ‘eating’ the text – and, again, the internalized reproduction of this in the texts themselves. Not only the content of the representations but also, and especially, their language is presented as ‘edible’. The remaining chapters of Part I are more detailed studies of individual texts. Chapter 4 analyses French Caribbean and Jewish intertextual relations in Gisèle Pineau's L'Exilselon Julia and Simone and André Schwarz-Bart's Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes. Maryse Condé's deliberate breaking of the ‘rules’ of literary discourse in Traversée de la mangrove is the subject of Chapter 5; and an interview with the author forms an Appendix to the book. Chapter 6 discusses postcolonial feminist theories of narrative agency in relation to Daniel Maximin's L’Île et une nuit.