Abstract

This reading of Edward Baugh’s seminal 1977 essay highlights its contextual affiliations and affinities and its relation to an anglophone Caribbean critical discourse on the representation and significance of history. Nadi Edwards delineates the intellectual genealogy of the concept of the quarrel with history, noting its intimations in critical reflections by George Lamming and John Hearne. Baugh’s signal contribution to this critical tradition lies in his incisive theorizing of the relationship between history and literature, his articulation of a conceptual vocabulary for addressing the recurring meme of history in Caribbean literature and criticism, and his symptomatic reading of the quarrel as an ontological and epistemological anxiety. The theoretical cogency and continuing relevance of Baugh’s intervention derive from his awareness and reformulation of the central critical questions that defined Caribbean writers’ relation to the past.

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