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I Walked with a Zombie
The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys by
Since her death in 1979, Jean Rhys's reputation as an important modernist author has grown. Her finely crafted prose fiction lends itself to multiple interpretations from radically different critical perspectives; formalism, feminism, and postcolonial studies among them. This Introduction offers a reliable and stimulating account of her life, work, contexts and critical reception. Her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, is analyzed together with her other novels, including Quartet and After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, and her short stories. Through close readings of the works, Elaine Savory reveals their common themes and connects these to different critical approaches. The book maps Rhys's fictional use of the actual geography of Paris, London and the Caribbean, showing how key understanding her relationships with the metropolitan and colonial spheres is to reading her texts. In this invaluable introduction for students, Savory explains the significance of Rhys as a writer both in her lifetime and today.
Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys' Fiction by
Using a theoretical approach and a critical summary, combining the perspectives in the postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis and narratology with the tools of hermeneutics and deconstruction, this book argues that Jean Rhys's work can be subsumed under a poetics of cultural identity and hybridity. It also demonstrates the validity of the concept of hybridization as the expression of identity formation; the cultural boundaries variability; the opposition self-otherness, authenticity-fiction, trans-textuality; and the relevance of an integrated approach to multiple cultural identities as an encountering and negotiation space between writer, reader and work. The complexity of ontological and epistemological representation involves an interdisciplinary approach that blends a literary interpretive approach to social, anthropological, cultural and historical perspectives. The book concludes that in the author's fictional universe, cultural identity is represented as a general human experience that transcends the specific conditionalities of geographical contexts, history and culture. The construction of identity by Jean Rhys is represented by the dichotomy of marginal identity and the identification with a human ideal designed either by the hegemonic discourse or metropolitan culture or by the dominant ideology. The identification with a pattern of cultural authenticity, of racial, ethnic, or national purism is presented as a purely destructive cultural projection, leading to the creation of a static universe in opposition to the diversity of human feelings and aspirations. Jean Rhys's fictional discourse lies between "the anxiety of authorship" and "the anxiety of influence" and shows the postcolonial era of uprooting and migration in which the national ownership diluted the image of a "home" ambiguous located at the boundary between a myth of origins and a myth of becoming. The relationship between the individual and socio-cultural space is thus shaped in a dual hybrid position.
Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women's Melancholia by
It's fatal making a fuss ... . -Jean Rhys, Quartet. Cathleen Maslen's Ferocious Things: Jean Rhys and the Politics of Women's Melancholia closely engages with the most obvious theme of Rhys's writing: the speaking and inscription of feminine anguish. Maslen resists easy generalisations with respect to Rhys's portrayal of women's psychic pain, attending carefully to the nuances of sexual, cultural and ethnic displacement which inform the suffering of Rhys's protagonists. Acknowledging the many fine recent critical engagements with Rhys's unique corpus of novels, Maslen insists that Rhys's particular articulation of women's pain presents a significant literary transgression, defying the intractable cultural interdiction against women 'making a fuss.' At the same time, this book engages with the problematic privileging of melancholic and nostalgic discourse in the Western canon in general. Rhys's work, Maslen argues, simultaneously celebrates and resists fundamentally Eurocentric and anti-feminist paradigms of melancholia and nostalgia. In short, the ferocious melancholia of Jean Rhys's female voices poses constructive paradoxes and points of departure for feminist and post-colonial debates in the 21st century.
Jean Rhys by
Neglected and forgotten for many years, the arresting, elliptical novels written by Dominican-born Jean Rhys are now widely acclaimed. Her last and most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, her retelling of Jane Eyre, is a central text for the imaginative re-examination of gender and colonial power relations. Helen Carr's account draws on both recent feminism and postcolonial theory, and places Rhys's work in relation to modernist and postmodernist writing. First published in 1996, Helen Carr's revised edition takes full cognizance of the wide critical attention paid to Rhys since that date.
Jean Rhys by
Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. She has played a major figure in debates attempting to establish the parameters of postcolonial and particularly Caribbean studies, and although she has long been seen as a modernist writer, she has also beenmarginalized as one who is not quite in, yet not quite out, either.The 10 newly commissioned essays and introduction collected in this volume demonstrate Jean Rhys's centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s, including Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and GoodMorning, Midnight, as well as her later bestseller, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The volume establishes Rhys as a major author with relevance to a number of different critical discourses, and includes a path-breaking section on affect theory that shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates withthe recent "affective turn" in the social sciences and humanities. As this collection shows, strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhys's portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth-century continue to trouble easy conceptualisations and critical categories.
Jean Rhys by
Jean Rhys has long been central to debates in feminist, modernist, Caribbean, British and postcolonial writing. Elaine Savory's study, first published in 1999, incorporates and modifies previous critical approaches and is a critical reading of Rhys's entire oeuvre, including the stories and autobiography, and is informed by Rhys's own manuscripts. Designed both for the serious scholar on Rhys and those unfamiliar with her writing, Savory's book insists on the importance of a Caribbean-centred approach to Rhys, and shows how this context profoundly affects her literary style. Informed by contemporary arguments on race, gender, class and nationality, Savory explores Rhys's stylistic innovations - her use of colours, her exploitation of the trope of performance, her experiments with creative non-fiction and her incorporation of the metaphysical into her texts. This study offers a comprehensive account of the life and work of this most complex and enigmatic of writers.
Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil by 
Narrating from the Margins: Self-representation of Female and Colonial Subjectivities in Jean Rhys's Novels by
In Narrating from the Margins, Nagihan Haliloolu casts a discerning look at Jean Rhys's protagonists and the ways in which they engage in self-narration. The book offers a close reading of Rhys's novels, with particular attention to the links between identity construction and self-narration, in a modernist and postcolonial idiom. It draws attention to particular subject-categories that Rhys's protagonists fall into, such as the amateur and the white Creole, and delineates narrating personas such as the mad witch and the zombie, to explore aspects of de-essentalization, narrative agency, and dysnarrativia. The way in which Rhys's protagonists engage in self-narration reveals the close link between race and gender, and how both are contained by similar metaphors, or how, indeed, they become metaphors for each other. The narrators are defined in relation to their place in the 'holy English family' and how they transgress the rules of that family to become 'exiles'. The study explores the ways in which the self-narrator responds when her narrative is obstructed by society; such as creating a community of stories in which her own makes sense, and/or resorting to third-person narration.
The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives by
According to Molly Hite, a number of influential contemporary women novelists--notably Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Alice Walker, and Margaret Atwood--attempt innovations in narrative form that are more radical in their implications than the dominant modes of fictional experimentation characterized as postmodernist. In The Other Side of the Story, Hite makes the point that these innovations, which distinguish the genre she calls contemporary feminist narrative, are more radical precisely because their context is the critique of a culture and a literary tradition apprehended as profoundly masculinist.
Postcolonial Screen Adaptation and the British Novel by
See the chapter: Moral Management: Spaces of Domestication in Jane Eyre and I Walked with a Zombie.
Territories of the Psyche: the Fiction of Jean Rhys by
Jean Rhys is widely credited for exposing issues of gender, nationality, race, and class in technically sophisticated, arresting narratives. Her lifelong exploration of the dynamics of the human psyche has, however, gone unrecognized. This examination places Rhys' fiction for the first time within the context of theories that reflect the interrelated perspectives of modern psychoanalysis. In clarifying accounts of many approaches that are new to literary scholars, as well as those that display the rich legacy of Freudian thought, Simpson shows that the paradigms of psychoanalysis illuminate the interpretation of Rhys' art. With insightful references to the short stories and close readings of her five novels, this study testifies to a remarkable achievement as Rhys recorded, with unflinching candor, the powerful drama of emotional life.
Whiteness and Trauma: The Mother-daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, and Toni Morrison by
This original and incisive study of the fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison uses cutting edge cultural and literary theory to examine the 'knotted' mother-daughter relations that form the thematic basis of the texts examined. Using both close reading and contextualization, the analyses are focused through issues of race and contemporary theorizing of whiteness and trauma. Remarkably eloquent, scholarly and thought-provoking, this book contributes strongly to the broad fields of literary criticism, feminist theory and whiteness studies.
Wide Sargasso Sea by
Beautiful and wealthy Antoinette Cosway's passionate love for an English aristocrat threatens to destroy her idyllic West Indian island existence and her very life.