By adopting a Caribbean perspective through which to re-examine seventeenth- to nineteenth-century texts from the British canon, this collection of essays uncovers the ways in which the literature produced at the height of British imperialism was used to validate the national identity of the colonizer, and to justify domination of Other places like the Caribbean.

The contributors critique a wide range of verse and prose, revealing a literature that was very much a product of its time, but that was also responsible for contemporary and later conceptions of the Caribbean and other outposts of empire. While the critics in this volume demonstrate how such texts constructed and perpetuated the "fact" of superior British culture and civilization, they also apply to their literary interpretation a Caribbean experience of challenges associated with nation building and identity formation.

Postscripts follows Barbara Lalla's Postcolonialisms, which offered Caribbean rereadings of English medieval verse. Like that earlier study, Postscripts addresses both scholars of English literature and literary history, and those of Caribbean and postcolonial studies, and speaks to a wide readership that spans cultures sharing a colonized or colonizing past.