Jean Rhys's Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics

Description

Addressing Jean Rhys's composition and positioning of her fiction, this book invites and challenges us to read the tacit, silent and explicit textual bearings she offers and reveals new insights about the formation, scope and complexity of Rhys's experimental aesthetics. Tracing the distinctive and shifting evolution of Rhys's experimental aesthetics over her career, Sue Thomas explores Rhys's practices of composition in her fiction and drafts, as well as her self-reflective comment on her writing. The author examines patterns of interrelation, intertextuality, intermediality and allusion, both diachronic and synchronic, as well as the cultural histories entwined within them. Through close analysis of these, this book reveals new experimental, thematic, generic and political reaches of Rhys's fiction and sharpens our insight into her complex writerly affiliations and lineages. Dedication Contents Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Jean Rhys’s modernist bearings and experimental aesthetics 1 Routes to Rhys’s early fiction 2 The tropical reaches of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie 3 Temporality, history and memory in Voyage in the Dark 4 Depressive time and jazz modernism in Good Morning, Midnight 5 Composing ‘Till September Petronella’ and ‘Tigers Are Better-Looking’ 6 The doudou and doudouism in Rhys’s fiction 7 Hurricane poetics in Wide Sargasso Sea Coda Selected Bibliography Index