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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Jean Rhys’s Modernist Bearings
1. Routes to Rhys’s Early Fiction
2. The Tropical Reaches of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
3. Temporality, History and Memory in Voyage in the Dark
4. Depressive Time and Jazz Modernism in Good Morning, Midnight
5. Composing “Till September Petronella” and “Tigers Are Better-Looking”
6. The Doudou and Doudouism in Rhys’s Fiction
7. Hurricane Poetics in Wide Sargasso Sea
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Sue Thomas is Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University, Australia. She is the author of, among other books, The Worlding of Jean Rhys (1999), Imperialism, Reform and the Making of English in Jane Eyre (2008) and Telling West Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures (2014).
SUE THOMAS is Senior Lecturer in English at La Trobe University. She has published extensively on Jean Rhys, late nineteenth- and twentieth-century women's writing, feminist theory, postcolonial writers, and Victorian and Edwardian periodicals. She is a member of the editorial boards of Jean Rhys Review, Australasian Victorian Studies Journal, and Meridian, and an advisory editor of New Literatures Review: Decolonising Literatures.
Summary
Addressing Jean Rhys’s composition and positioning of her fiction, this book invites and challenges us to read the tacit, silent and explicit textual bearings she offers and reveals new insights about the formation, scope and complexity of Rhys’s experimental aesthetics.
Tracing the distinctive and shifting evolution of Rhys’s experimental aesthetics over her career, Sue Thomas explores Rhys’s practices of composition in her fiction and drafts, as well as her self-reflective comment on her writing. The author examines patterns of interrelation, intertextuality, intermediality and allusion, both diachronic and synchronic, as well as the cultural histories entwined within them. Through close analysis of these, this book reveals new experimental, thematic, generic and political reaches of Rhys’s fiction and sharpens our insight into her complex writerly affiliations and lineages.
