A Harlot's Progress by David Dabydeen

A Harlot's Progress by David Dabydeen

A HARLOT'S PROGRESS reinvents William Hogarth's famous painting of 1732 which tells the story of a whore, a Jewish merchant, a magistrate and a quack doctor bound together by sexual and financial greed. Dabydeen's novel endows Hogarth's characters with alternative potential lives, redeeming them for their cliched status as predators or victims. The protagonist - in Hogarth, a black slave boy, in Dabydeen, London's oldest black inhabitant - is forced to tell his story to the Abolitionists in return for their charity. He refuses however to supply parade of grievances, and to give a simplistic account of beatings, sexual abuses, etc. He will not embark upon yet another fictional journey into the dark nature of slavery for the voyeuristic delight of the English reader. Instead, the old man ties the reader up in knots as deftly as a harlot her client: he spins a tale of myths, half-truths and fantasies; recreating Africa and eighteenth-century London in startlingly poetic ways. What matters to him is the odyssey into poetry, the rich texture of his narrative, not its truthfulness. In this, his fourth novel, David Dabydeen opens up history to myriad imaginary interpretations, repopulating a vanished world with a strange, defiantly vivid and compassionate humanity.

David Dabydeen's new novel takes as its starting point Hogarth's painting of 1732..and sets out to release the people it represents - prostitute, merchant, quack doctor and slave boy - from easy moralism, both the artist's and our own... Dabydeen has an imaginative mastery of the period, and can render it a hundred ways * Observer *
Exhilarating...Beguiling and provocative * The Times *
The best of the younger generation of Caribbean novelists -- Penelope Lively
His strong vision… suggests that, for the recreation of lost meaning, it is necessary to strike off the fetters of narrative, and be released into poetry. -- Hilary Mantel * The Independent *

David Dabydeen is the director of the University of Warwick's Institute for Caribbean Studies. He was born in Guyana but has spent most of his life in the United Kingdom. He is the author of the novels The Intended, Disappearance, The Counting House, and A Harlot's Progress, as well as two previous collections of poetry, Slave Song and Coolie Odyssey, which won the Commonwealth Poetry Award. He is regarded as one of the best writers in the United Kingdom. He's also the author of Hogarth's Blacks: Visions of Blacks in 18th Century English Painting, The Counting House, and A Harlot's Progress.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780099288725
ISBN 10	0099288729
Title	A Harlot's Progress
Author	David Dabydeen
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Vintage Publishing
Year published	2000-05-04
Number of pages	288
Prizes	Short-listed for James Tait Black Memorial Book Prize: Fiction 2000
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.