Jean Rhys : twenty-first-century approaches

Presents new critical perspectives on Jean Rhys in relation to modernism, postcolonialism, and theories of affect. The 11 newly commissioned essays collected in this volume demonstrate Jean Rhys's centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s, including Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, as well as her later bestseller, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The volume establishes Rhys as a major author with relevance to a number of different critical discourses, and includes a path breaking section on affect theory that shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates with the recent 'affective turn' in the social sciences and humanities. As this collection shows, strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhys's portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late 20th century continue to trouble easy conceptualisations and critical categories. New and original work on Jean Rhys's fiction and short stories, highlighting key areas of her work; contributors are leading scholars on Jean Rhys from the US, the UK, and Australia, including Mary Lou Emery, Elaine Savory, John J. Su, Maroula Joannou, H. Adlai Murdoch, Rishona Zimring, Carine Mardorossian, Patricia Moran, Erica L. Johnson, and Sue Thomas and organised around 3 important themes: Rhys and modernism, the postcolonial Rhys, and Rhys and affect theory.