Transnational Jean Rhys: Lines of Transmission, Lines of Flight

by Juliana Lopoukhine (Editor), Frédéric Regard (Editor), Kerry-Jane Wallart (Editor)

Overview

This volume investigates the frameworks that can be applied to reading Caribbean author Jean Rhys. While Wide Sargasso Sea famously displays overt forms of literary influences, Jean Rhys's entire oeuvre is so fraught with connections to other texts and textual practices across geographical boundaries that her classification as a cosmopolitan modernist writer is due for reassessment.

Transnational Jean Rhys argues against the relative isolationism that is sometimes associated with Rhys's writing by demonstrating both how she was influenced by a wide range of foreign – especially French – authors and how her influence was in turn disseminated in myriad directions. Including an interview with Black Atlantic novelist Caryl Phillips, this collection charts new territories in the influences on/of an author known for her dislike of literary coteries, but whose literary communality has been underestimated.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501361302
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/10/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	605 KB

About the Author

Juliana Lopoukhine is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France.

Frédéric Regard is Professor of English Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France.

Kerry-Jane Wallart is Professor in Black Atlantic Studies at the University of Orléans, France.
Juliana Lopoukhine is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France. She has published various chapters and articles on women modernist writers (Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Rose Macaulay), a critical edition of Mrs Dalloway (2013), and co-edited three issues of L'Atelier (2016, 2019, 2020). She wrote her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Chantal Delourme and Scott McCracken and received her PhD from the Université de Paris-Nanterre, France and Keele University, UK.
Frédéric Regard is Professor of 19th- and 20th-century English literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France. He is the author of books on William Golding, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and 'feminine writing', as well as countless peer-reviewed articles. He also edited collections of essays on life-writing and exploration narratives. His latest work, Le Détective était une femme (2018), bears on gender issues in the genesis of the detective novel as a genre.
Kerry-Jane Wallart is Professor in Black Atlantic studies at the University of Orléans, France. Her Alma Mater is the École Normale Supérieure Ulm and she has been a Procter Fellow at Princeton University. She has published over 30 book chapters and articles, co-edited an issue of Sillages Critiques (2019), an issue of Revue de Littérature Comparée (2017), a volume on Jamaica Kincaid, published by Wagadu in 2018, and edited three issues of Commonwealth Essays and Studies (2019, 2012 and 2009).

Table of Contents

List of contributors
Foreword
Judith Raiskin (University of Oregon, USA)
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction: On reading Rhys transnationally
Juliana Lopoukhine (University of Paris-Sorbonne, France), Frédéric Regard (University of Paris-Sorbonne, France) and Kerry-Jane Wallart (University of Orléans, France)
Part 1 Lines of transmission: Rhys's continental transculturalism
1. The white Creole in Paris: Joséphine, Colette and Jean Rhys's Quartet and Good Morning, Midnight
Elaine Savory (New School, USA)
2. Strange defeat: Good Morning, Midnight and Marc Bloch's L'Étrange défaite
Scott McCracken (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
3. 'Also I do like the moderns': Reading Rhys's reading
Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University, UK)
4. 'Parler de soi': Jean Rhys and the uses of life writing
Simon Cooke (University of Edinburgh, UK)
5. Jean Rhys and Indonesia: A lineage and alienage
Chris GoGwilt (Fordham University, USA)
Part 2 Lines of flight: Rhys's transnational legacy
6. Jean Rhys in Australian neo-Victorian and Great House imaginaries
Sue Thomas (LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia)
7. Twisted lines in Caribbean postcolonial Modernism: Jean Rhys and Edward Kamau Brathwaite
Françoise Clary (Rouen University, France)
8. Dressing and addressing the self: Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and the cultural politics of self-fashioning
Denise deCaires Narain (University of Sussex, UK)
9. 'Competing conversations': Voice and identity in Caryl Phillips's A View of the Empire at Sunset
Kathie Birat (University of Lorraine, France)
10. 'A journey into the familiar underworld': Revisiting Jean Rhys in Caryl Phillips's A View of the Empire at Sunset
Catherine Lanone (Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris, France)
11. 'The small things that they've not been able to talk about': An interview with Caryl Phillips about his novel A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018)
Kerry-Jane Wallart
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"An international collection, featuring many of the experts in the field, which removes Rhys's texts from previous categorizations and takes new transnational and transcultural routes to account for this 'unplaceable' writer. An illuminating reappraisal of her work, of its enduring power and relevance to today's globalized world." --Sylvie Maurel, Lecturer in English, University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France

"This thoughtfully conceived volume charts Jean Rhys's Caribbean modernism in transcultural passages through England to Europe, especially France, and to Australia and Indonesia, often circuiting back through the Caribbean. Reading Rhys in these extended global contexts reveals new narrative currents within her fiction and creative dialogic responses to it. Transnational Jean Rhys makes a strong case for Rhys as a major literary figure of cosmopolitan origins and influence whose writing continues to inspire the literary, sound, visual and dramatic arts." --Mary Lou Emery, Professor Emerita of English, University of Iowa, USA

"Transnational Jean Rhys is an exciting collection of detective work that yields new insights into Jean Rhys and her work. We discover the wide range of international authors and intellectual trends that influenced her writing, the places she wrote about and the writers across the globe who reference her fiction, and the 'lines of transmission' that connected Rhys the author to such disparate productions as neo-Victorian Australian Great House fiction and Caryl Phillips's new bio-fiction of 'Gwendolyn Williams'. At a time of closed borders and categorization of those who may enter and those who may not, thank goodness for a book that starts from the premise that 'placing' Jean Rhys 'is not only impossible, but simply beside the point'. Indeed, a wealth of perspectives develop how her peripatetic transnational horizon impacted her writing and radiated outward to impact on that of other authors. This is a brave and fascinating recontextualization of the author and her stories." --Evelyn O'Callaghan, Professor of West Indian Literature, University of the West Indies-Cave Hill, Barbados

From the Publisher