Jean Rhys at "World's End" : novels of colonial and sexual exile / by Mary Lou Emery.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Emery, Mary Lou, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rhys, Jean--Criticism and interpretation.

Rhys, Jean.

Women and literature--England--History--20th century.

Women and literature.

Colonies in literature.

Sex role in literature.

Exiles in literature.

Women in literature.

Caribbean Area--In literature.

Caribbean Area.

West Indies--In literature.

West Indies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (236 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Austin, Texas : University of Texas Press, 1990.

Summary:

The Caribbean Islands have long been an uneasy meeting place among indigenous peoples, white European colonists, and black slave populations. Tense oppositions in Caribbean culture—colonial vs. native, white vs. black, male conqueror vs. female subject—supply powerful themes and spark complex narrative experiments in the fiction of Dominica-born novelist Jean Rhys. In this pathfinding study, Mary Lou Emery focuses on Rhys's handling of these oppositions, using a Caribbean cultural perspective to replace the mainly European aesthetic, moral, and psychological standards that have served to misread and sometimes devalue Rhys's writing. Emery considers all five Rhys novels, beginning with Wide Sargasso Sea as the most explicitly Caribbean in its setting, in its participation in the culminating decades of a West Indian literary naissance, and most importantly, in its subversive transformation of European concepts of character. From a sociocultural perspective, she argues persuasively that the earlier novels—Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight—should be read as emergent Caribbean fiction, written in tense dialogue with European modernism. Building on this thesis, she reveals how the apparent passivity, masochism, or silence of Rhys's female protagonists results from their doubly marginalized status as women and as subject peoples. Also, she explores how Rhys's women seek out alternative identities in dreamed of, magically realized, or chosen communities. These discoveries offer important insights on literary modernism, Caribbean fiction, and the formation of female identity.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Content

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One Masquerades

1. Modernist Crosscurrents

2. Countertexts, Countercommunities

Part Two. Marooned

3. Wide Sargasso Sea: Obeah Nights

4. Voyage in the Dark: Carnival/Consciousness

Part Three. Other Women

5. Voyage in the Dark: The Other Great War

6. Quartet: "Postures," Possession, and Point of View

7. After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie: Repetition and Counterromance

8. Good Morning, Midnight: The Paris Exhibition and the Paradox of Style

Conclusion: "World's End and a Beginning"

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-292-75549-X

OCLC:

1286807525