Transnational Jean Rhys.  Ed. Juliana Lopoukhine, Frédéric Regard et Kerry-Jane Wallart

New York, Bloomsbury, 2021

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/transnational-jean-rhys-9781501361319/

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.
Table of contents

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 alineage
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

Transnational Jean Rhys