Read more
Best known as the author of
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys continues to draw growing amounts of popular and scholarly attention. This book explores Rhys's sense of world, the cross-cultural and the international in her novels, stories, and autobiographical writing. The volume situates Rhys's writing in relation to the Dominican cultural production with which she was familiar, to Rhys's family's history on the island, and to European ethnographic discourses about white creole people. Special attention is given to the political and ethical locations of Rhys's authorial and narrative voices with respect to discourses of empire, gender, sex, race, class, ethnicity, and desire. The book demonstrates that an historical reading of Rhys's work poses questions for a number of current theoretical approaches.
Where and how does Jean Rhys write herself, her fiction, and her characters into history? To address this question, Sue Thomas has conducted wide-ranging primary and original research to elucidate Rhys's sense of world, the cross-cultural and the international in her novels, stories, and autobiographical writing. She situates Rhys's writing in relation to the Dominican cultural production and traffic with which she was familiar, to Rhys's family's history on the island, and to European ethnographic discourses about white creole people.
In her reading of Rhys's fiction and autobiographical texts she analyzes the political and ethical locations of Rhys's authorial and narrative voices with respect to discourses of empire, gender, sex, race, class, ethnicity, and desire that shaped Rhys's sense of the materiality of the world. In doing so, Thomas draws out new dimensions of the racial, ethnic, and sexual formation of Rhys's modernism. As a result, she demonstrates that an historical reading of Rhys's work poses questions for a number of current theoretical approaches.
List of contents
Introduction
Jean Rhys and Dominican Autoethnography
"Grilled Sole" and an Experience of "Mental" Seduction
An Antillean Voice
Telling of the "Amateur"
The Equivoice of Caribbean Patois and Song
"Just a Cerebrale or You Can't Stop Me From Dreaming"
The Labyrinths of "A Savage Person--a Real Carib"
A Place-To-Be-From
Works Cited
Works Consulted
Index
About the author
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.
