"British literature, from the medieval to the postmodern, has been the training ground of Caribbean authors, poets and critics, and continues to be taught at secondary and tertiary levels throughout the region and in a wide range of countries that share the region's history of colonialism. Relatively little has been done, however, to integrate Caribbean approaches to the canon." "In Postcolonialisms, Barbara Lalla interrogates the place of early English verse in relation to the British canon, proposing that the first postcolonial literature in English was English itself, a vernacular literature developing from a series of contact situations and evolving as a mechanism of resistance. The enquiry integrates several approaches to textual study, drawing together, on the one hand, postcolonial and Caribbean criticism and, on the other, methods of historical and contact linguistics, and applying these within a framework of thought consistent with current medieval criticism." "The text is framed to discuss the theory that the society that produced Middle English literature was built on a past of contact, conquest and dispossession, and that Middle English verse both projects and interrogates imperial convention."--Jacket.