Full Description
Jean Rhys' position upon the literary map of the 20th century remains unstable, even after Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). She shunned public exposure and yet, desperately sought acknowledgement by her own peers; she stood away from the modernist circles of Montparnasse, in Paris, and yet, explored a radically avant-garde writing which retrospectively makes her rank among them, while her always problematic authority places her in the marginalized position of the postcolonial author.
'Writing precariously', in the case of Jean Rhys, reaches far beyond a mere posture of submission or a necessity to cope with a lack of money or a 'room of one's own'. Rather, it becomes an ethical and political stance that engages with forms of minimal resistance to forms of subjection just as the very precariousness of her writing thwarts any efforts to 'place' her or her work, to frame her characters or label her style. With Jean Rhys, precariousness is the site where voices silenced and bodies dismissed by a gendered or imperialistic power may be retrieved, until their vulnerability becomes a dislodging force that makes the power structures precarious in turn.
This book reassesses the precariousness of Jean Rhys as a distinct positionality eliciting an isolated voice which insists and persists. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Women: A Cultural Review.
Contents
Introduction—Jean Rhys: Writing Precariously 1. Inaudible Voices in Sleep It Off Lady 2. Post-scripted Transmissions in Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark 3. The Voices of Others: Intertextuality and Authorial Presences in Jean Rhys's Short Fiction 4. Writing Jean Rhys a Life: The Circumvolutions of Transmission Lines in the Memoirs and Biographies of Jean Rhys 5. Jean Rhys's Phantom Manuscript: 'December 4th., 1938. Mr. Howard's House. CREOLE.' 6. Farewell, Socialist Gwen: Poverty and the Politics of Injury in Jean Rhys's Interwar Fiction 7. 'Outside the Machine': Stasis and Conflict in the work of Jean Rhys 8. Painting the Cardboard House Red: Rewriting Colour in Wide Sargasso Sea
