Contributions to the Study of World Literature: The Worlding of Jean Rhys - Other

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.