Evelyn O’Callaghan (University of the West Indies)
One of the quiet revolutions which has taken place in the study of West Indian literature is a expansion of the field of study beyond scribal works to oral and visual texts, and this paper proposes to advocate the continued value of a comparative interdisciplinary approach. Accordingly, I draw on William Beckford’s A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, published in 1790, with paintings and prints of his Jamaican estates by the itinerant artist, George Robertson. With Krista Thompson and Jill Casid, I suggest that “imperial picturesque landscaping aesthetics” in the text are reinforced by the images, to pass of colonial transplantation as natural and to mask the materialist matrix of the plantation economy by imposing a screen of picturesque composition.
