A Small Place (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

By SparkNotes

A Small Place (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Jamaica Kincaid
Making the reading experience fun!
Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster.   Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides:   *Chapter-by-chapter analysis
*Explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols
*A review quiz and essay topics Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers

• Language: English
• Publisher: SparkNotes
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781411477667

Book preview

Cover of SparkNotes Guide to A Small Place by SparkNotes Editors

A Small Place

Jamaica Kincaid

© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7766-7

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Contents

Context

Plot Overview

Character List

Analysis of Major Characters

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Important Quotations Explained

Key Facts

Context

Elaine Potter Richardson, who later became the novelist and essayist Jamaica Kincaid, was born in 1949 in St. John’s, the capital city of the Caribbean island of Antigua. By Kincaid’s own account, she was a highly intelligent but often moody child, and she became increasingly distant from her mother as the family grew in number—an estrangement that would later become a central theme in her fiction. As she matured, Kincaid also became estranged from the social and cultural milieu in which she found herself. Too ambitious and intellectually curious to be satisfied with her career prospects in her tiny island home, she was also becoming alienated from the mostly white, European tradition handed down to her through her colonial education. At seventeen, Kincaid moved to New York to work as an au pair while continuing her studies, eventually earning a scholarship to Franconia College in New Hampshire. Dissatisfied, she left school after a year and moved back to Manhattan, where she began working as a magazine and newspaper