%0 Journal Article
%T ¡°The Fortunate Traveller¡± in transit: On a Walcott manuscript and the vicissitudes of North and South
%A Michael R. Griffiths
%J The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
%@ 1741-6442
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0021989416638713
%X In the early months of 1980, during revision of a collection that was at that time to be called North and South, Derek Walcott typed a 12 page poem. This poem, I argue, would form the kernel of one that would eventually lend its name ¡ª ¡°The Fortunate Traveller¡± ¡ª to the renamed title of the whole collection. Far from the suggestive and sparse, if undeniably political, poem that would be published in that 1981 volume, this early draft reads like a manifesto: both of poetics and of politics. This article takes that unpublished manuscript as a point of departure for thinking through issues of vernacular language and its eschewal, the question of centre and periphery, and Walcott¡¯s avoidance of what would come to be known as ¡°South¨CSouth¡± oriented postcolonial criticism. The article ultimately argues that it is through attention to neoliberalism that Walcott produces a novel approach to these questions of language and space
%K Derek Walcott
%K postcolonial literature
%K neoliberalism
%K Commonwealth literature
%K postcolonial poetry
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0021989416638713