Jean Rhys

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.

The Caliban-Prospero encounter in Shakespeare's The Tempest has evolved as a metaphor for the colonial experience. This book utilizes the Caliban symbol in examining the influence of colonialism in Caribbean literature, focusing on three major writers: Jean Rhys of Dominica, George Lamming of Barbados, and Sam Selvon of Trinidad. The novels chosen are set in England where the writers and their characters experience the alienation of the exiled--unwelcome in Prospero's home country. Other Caribbean writers are included in the analysis, and the volume concludes by examining contemporary writers for whom Caliban's role appears to be shifting beyond physical exile.

Reflecting the salient undercurrents of contemporary researh on women writers, this volume is an appraisal of the work of the writer as woman and presents critics' perceptions about how women writers have dealt with the complexity of changing female visions in the 20th century. Each of the 34 essays, contributed by some of today's most distinguished writers, speaks to the work of a particular 20th-century woman writer, and each constitutes a contribution to the scholarly debate.

Colonialism left an indelible mark on writers from the Caribbean. Many of the midcentury male writers, on the eve of independence, looked to England for their models. The current generation of authors, many of whom are women, have increasingly looked-& relocated-to the United States. Incorporating postcolonial theory, West Indian literature, feminist theory, & African American literary criticism, Making Men carves out a particular relationship between the Caribbean canon-as represented by C. L. R. James & V. S. Naipaul, among others-& contemporary Caribbean women writers such as Jean Rhys, & Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, & Michelle Cliff, who now live in the United States. Discussing the canonical Caribbean narrative as it reflects national identity under the domination of English cultural authority, Belinda Edmondson focuses particularly on the pervasive influence of Victorian sensibilities in the structuring of twentieth-century national identity. She shows that issues of race & English constructions of masculinity not only are central to West Indian identity but also connect Caribbean authorship to the English literary tradition. This perspective on the origins of West Indian literary nationalism then informs Edmondson's search for female subjectivity in current literature by West Indian women immigrants in America. Making Men compares the intellectual exile of men with the economic migration of women, linking the canonical male tradition to the writing of modern West Indian women & exploring how the latter write within & against the historical male paradigm in the continuing process of national definition. With theoretical claims that invite new discourse on English, Caribbean, & American ideas of exile, migration, race, gender identity, & literary authority, Making Men will be informative reading for those involved with postcolonial theory, African American & women's studies, & Caribbean literature.

"Even when available elsewhere, information on these 50 English-language authors is sparse; the in-depth treatment here includes biography, description of major works and themes, summary of critical reception, and an exhaustive bibliography of works by and about each author. Both academic and public libraries will want to accept this invitation to another world." Library Journal

Elaine Savory's study is a critical reading of Rhys' entire oeuvre, including the stories and autobiography, and is informed by recently released unpublished manuscripts by Rhys. Designed both for the serious scholar and those unfamiliar with Rhys' writing, Savory's book insists on the importance of a Caribbean-centered approach to Rhys, and shows how this context profoundly affects her literary style. Informed by contemporary arguments on race, gender, class and nationality, this study offers a comprehensive account of the life and work of this most complex and enigmatic of writers.