The Complete Works of Egbert Martin

FAIN: HB-282233-22

Manu Samriti Chander
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark (Newark, NJ 07104-3010)

Writing and revision for an edition of the collected works of Guyanese belletrist, Egbert Martin (c. 1861-1890).

Following emancipation in the 1830s, Guyana (then British Guiana) witnessed a boom in literary output. Technological advancements in printing in the colonies and the rise of a new Black middle class meant that, for the first time, Afro-Guyanese voices were being heard. At the forefront of a growing group of Black literary figures was Egbert Martin, the colony’s “most important nineteenth-century poet,” according to Laurence Breiner’s Introduction to West Indian Poetry (Cambridge UP, 1998) and, in the words of the Harlem Renaissance writer Arthur Schomburg, “one of the greatest Negro poets in history.” The Complete Works of Egbert Martin brings together all of Martin’s known writings, many of which have been remained unpublished since they first appeared in Guyanese periodicals in the 1880s and many of which I have newly discovered.