Selvon’s Stylistics: Self-Conscious Language Production in An Island Is a World

Samuel Selvon’s 1955 novel An Island Is a World portrays characters who intentionally alter the linguistic and prosaic features of their speech in response to different social situations. Although he resists being defined by categories such as nationality, race, and class, the protagonist, Foster, a writer with biographical similarities to Selvon, exhibits anxiety about communicating himself and his ideas even in everyday interactions. The discourse of fiction provides an opportunity to explore self-conscious production since an omniscient narrator has access to characters’ speech and thought, including to their thinking about speaking. Leech and Short (Style in fiction: a linguistic introduction to fictional prose. Longman, London, 1981) propose that the direct and indirect presentation of characters’ speech and thought involves varying degrees of linguistic interference. Semino and Short (Corpus stylistics: speech, writing and thought presentation in a corpus of English writing. Routledge, London/New York, 2004) and Short (Style 41(2):227–243, 2007; Style Fiction Today 4:27–42, 2013) extend this theory to the free direct presentation of characters’ writings. Analysing discourse presentation in An Island Is a World demonstrates the importance of the perspective markers that distinguish direct and indirect discourse. Shifts in pronouns, tenses, and adverbs create ambiguity about whether passages of writing belong to the character or the narrator and concretise Foster’s philosophical ideas about the particular versus the universal, the habitual versus the momentous, and the local versus the global. This stylistic experimentation allows the writer to overcome self-consciousness and achieve self-expression through language.