Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and note on the text
- Chronology
- 1 Living on both sides, living to write
- 2 Registering protest: The Left Bank and Quartet
- 3 A Caribbean woman lost in Europe?: After Leaving Mr MacKenzie and the question of gender
- 4 Writing colour, writing Caribbean: Voyage in the Dark and the politics of colour
- 5 Dangerous spirit, bitterly amused: Good Morning, Midnight
- 6 People in and out of place: spatial arrangements in Wide Sargasso Sea
- 7 Brief encounters: Rhys and the craft of the short story
- 8 Performance arts: the theatre of autobiography and the role of the personal essay
- 9 The Helen of our wars: cultural politics and Jean Rhys criticism
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and note on the text
- Chronology
- 1 Living on both sides, living to write
- 2 Registering protest: The Left Bank and Quartet
- 3 A Caribbean woman lost in Europe?: After Leaving Mr MacKenzie and the question of gender
- 4 Writing colour, writing Caribbean: Voyage in the Dark and the politics of colour
- 5 Dangerous spirit, bitterly amused: Good Morning, Midnight
- 6 People in and out of place: spatial arrangements in Wide Sargasso Sea
- 7 Brief encounters: Rhys and the craft of the short story
- 8 Performance arts: the theatre of autobiography and the role of the personal essay
- 9 The Helen of our wars: cultural politics and Jean Rhys criticism
- Notes
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
Jean Rhys and her texts have been interpreted by different critics and theorists in strikingly different ways. She and they are in those readings: Caribbean, English, European; feminist and antifeminist; elite, working class, marginal; white and white Creole; outsider and insider; ageless and of her time. But one identity can hold all of these contradictory facets: Rhys is a Caribbean writer. In her very complexity and contradictoriness, in important aspects of her writing style and in her fictional portrayal of race, ethnicity, class, gender and nationality, she is best understood within the richly diverse tradition of Caribbean literature and culture. The scribal aspect of this tradition has largely come into being as part of local and global anti- or post-colonial movements but equally as much as an important component of nation-building. At this time, almost the turn of the century, Caribbean writing reflects both the extensive migration of Caribbean peoples to Europe, America and Canada and also the need to confirm and define nationality and regional identity.
Rhys reflects two major facets of Caribbean culture: a multifaceted cosmopolitanism which searches out complexity and a desire for home and belonging which seeks an uncomplicated self-definition. Like Caribbean culture, her writing is both metropolitan and anti-metropolitan, both colonial and anti-colonial, both racist and anti-racist, both conventional and subversive.
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- Jean Rhys , pp. x - xviPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999