Narrating from the margins : self-representation of female and colonial subjectivities in Jean Rhys's novels / Nagihan Haliloğlu.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Haliloğlu, Nagihan.

Series:

Cross/cultures ; 135.

Cross/cultures ; 135

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rhys, Jean--Criticism and interpretation.

Rhys, Jean.

Self-consciousness (Awareness) in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (220 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Amsterdam : Rodopi, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In Narrating from the Margins , Nagihan Haliloğlu 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.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

The Concern for Self-Possession

Self-Narration: Conditions, Representations, and Consequences

The Female Self in Rhys and the Category of the Amateur

Positioning Rhys’s Heroines within Colonial Relations

Narrative Responses to ‘Exile From the English Family’: The Zombie and the Mad Witch

White Female Colonial Self-Articulation: Narrative of Displacement in Voyage in the Dark

Colonial Creatures: The Community of Life-Stories in Good Morning, Midnight

Quartet: The Making of the Amateur and Third-Person Self-Narration

Intersubjectivity and Self-Arrangements in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie

Membership in the Holy English Family and Mad-Witch Narration in Wide Sargasso Sea

Conclusion: Self-Narratives for the Chorus Girl and the Horrid Colonial

Works Cited

Index.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

The author's revised dissertation (Ph. D.)--University of Heidelberg, 2009.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

94-012-0066-1

OCLC:

741492999

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789401200660 DOI