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The Worlding of Jean Rhys:
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.
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.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
5 people want to read
About the author
Sue Thomas
6 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Professor Sue Thomas has been Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Australian Research Council (ARC) since July 2017.
Among her many publications are Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952): A Bibliography, Telling West Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures 1804-1834, (2014) Tracking the Literature of Tropical Weather: Typhoons, Hurricanes, and Cyclones (2017) (co-editor with Anne Collett and Russell McDougall), and co-authoring England Through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction (2001) with Ann Blake and Leela Gandhi.
Professor Thomas has also published extensively on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century women writers, and decolonising literatures.
Professor Sue Thomas has been Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Australian Research Council (ARC) since July 2017.
Among her many publications are Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952): A Bibliography, Telling West Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures 1804-1834, (2014) Tracking the Literature of Tropical Weather: Typhoons, Hurricanes, and Cyclones (2017) (co-editor with Anne Collett and Russell McDougall), and co-authoring England Through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction (2001) with Ann Blake and Leela Gandhi.
Professor Thomas has also published extensively on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century women writers, and decolonising literatures.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 30, 2010
thoughtful analysis of the body of jean rhys's work. although i didn't agree with all of thomas's ideas, she makes excellent connections among texts and opens up the worlds that rhys creates. solid, understandable scholarship.
Displaying 1 of 1 review