Edgar Mittelholzer

For the past thirty years Mittelholzer disappeared totally, his books obtainable only second hand, and his reputation solidified as at best being that of a literary ancestor, a pot-boiling writer obsessed with sex and race-mixing and given to right-wing, authoritarian views . . .

— At the Caribbean Literary Salon blog, Peepal Tree Press founder Jeremy Poynting writes about returning Edgar Mittelholzer to print and the importance of reconsidering the work of this writer “of immense literary ambition and imagination”:

There is his fascination with musical form as analogous to the form of the novel and his idiosyncratic take on a number of the devices of modernist fiction. There is his perception that the confrontations manifest in early nineteenth century writing (between the optimism of the rationalist project, the gothic sensibility of darkness and disorder and the romantic discovery of truth to inner feeling) were pertinent to Caribbean societies in the process of making themselves after the sleep of colonialism. And with this seriousness went a compulsive urgency to tell stories.

(For more on Peepal Tree’s Caribbean Modern Classics series, see this interview with Poynting in the May 2010 CRB.)