Marina Warner, Indigo, or Mapping the Waters

Download PDF Add to Bookshelf Tweet Report an Error

Indigo, or, Mapping the Waters (1992) is richly intertextual, taking inspiration, foremost, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marina Warner’s own family history. The text’s structure is complex, a palimpsest of oral and written narratives, letters, and epigraphs taken from European and Caribbean literature. The main narrative is composed of two stories, moving between seventeenth-century Liamuiga, a Caribbean island, and twentieth-century Europe and Enfant-Béate. Liamuiga and its sister isle Oualie form the colony of Enfant-Béate, and are based on the real islands of St. Kitts and Nevis. In 1623-24, Captain Thomas Warner, the author’s ancestor, established Britain’s first Caribbean colony on St. Kitts. Legend h…

2926 words

Citation: Dunn, Jennifer. "Indigo, or Mapping the Waters". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 April 2011 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4448, accessed 23 November 2024.]

4448 Indigo, or Mapping the Waters 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Leave Feedback

The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.