Jean Rhys's Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics

Sue Thomas is Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University, Australia. She is the author of, among other books, The Worlding of Jean Rhys (1999), Imperialism, Reform and the Making of English in Jane Eyre (2008) and Telling West Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures (2014).

This book offers a virtuosic and revelatory exploration of Jean Rhys’s intertextual and intermedial practice. Sue Thomas not only uncovers the depth and eclecticism of Rhys’s allusions to literary, artistic, dramatic and musical cultures, but argues for their centrality to her decolonial and feminist politics and her radical aesthetics.

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Jean Rhys’s Modernist Bearings1. Routes to Rhys’s Early Fiction 2. The Tropical Reaches of After Leaving Mr Mackenzie3. Temporality, History and Memory in Voyage in the Dark 4. Depressive Time and Jazz Modernism in Good Morning, Midnight5. Composing “Till September Petronella” and “Tigers Are Better-Looking”6. The Doudou and Doudouism in Rhys’s Fiction7. Hurricane Poetics in Wide Sargasso SeaNotesSelected BibliographyIndex