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Hua, Chui-fung. "Alienation in three novels by Jean Rhys /." View the Table of Contents & Abstract, 2005. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B3160254X.
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Le, Gallez Paula. "The 'Rhys Woman' : An examination of character in the work of Jean Rhys." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.376777.
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Hua, Chui-fung, and 許翠鳳. "Alienation in three novels by Jean Rhys." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2005. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B45007512.
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Rovera, Catherine. "Scénographies de la voix dans l'oeuvre de Jean Rhys." Paris 3, 2001. http://www.theses.fr/2001PA030009.
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Cette these prend pour objet d'etude la poetique de la voix chez jean rhys (18901979). Elle cherche a retracer le cheminement de cette voix, a la fois singuliere et polymorphe, qui se construit au fil des romans et nouvelles. Il s'agit d'une ~uvre en triptyque, orchestree autour de trois lieux de memoire, qui sont autant de paysages culturels : le paris-boheme des annees folles; la scene musicalede l'angleterre edouardienne; l'archipel caribeen de la grande epoque coloniale. Entrant en resonance (mais parfois aussi en dissonance) avec ces trois poles d'attraction, la voix du sujet rhysien emprunte un cours sinueux, et meme tortueux, qui la conduit du roman naturaliste francais jusqu'a la chanson traditionnelle creole en passant par le music-hall anglais de l'avant-guerre. La modernite rhysienne serait alors dans le choix - peu orthodoxe - d'un modernisme teinte d'antillanite. La voix rhysienne est invariablement liee aux arts de la scene, et elle se livre au travers de scenarios d'ecriture relevant simultanement du texte de theatre et de la partition musicale. Elle emprunte en particulier a une multitude de genres ou de registres traditionnellement consideres comme mineurs : chanson populaire, melodrame, pantomime, operette, comedie musicale, spectacle de varietes. La culture populaire constitue par consequent le volet central de l'approche "scenographique" developpee dans cette these. On s'est interesse en priorite aux rapports etroits qui se nouent entre le musichall edouardien et l'ecriture moderniste de fiction. Ce travail repond ainsi a une double preoccupation, esthetique et culturelle, cela afin de rendre compte de la complexe choregraphie des corps et des voix qui gouverne le texte rhysien.
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Maurel, Sylvie. "L'oeuvre de Jean Rhys : le texte et son ombre." Paris 3, 1995. http://www.theses.fr/1995PA030103.
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Le texte de jean rhys est le lieu d'une quete du referent. La chose, rendue incaccessible par les ecrans semiotiques du langage et du deja-dit, se refuse toujours au signe. Elle ne peut etre saisie qsue dans les zones d'ombre que les reseaux consensuels de la signification n'atteignent pas. Jean rhys met la reference en crise pour la reactiver. Elle travaille la forme romanesque de maniere a y faire entre l'ombre, sans jamais rompre avec la lisibilite du texteJean rhys's text is the locus of a referential quest. The thing, concealed by the semiotic screens of language and of previous texts, always eludes the sign. The referent can only be captured in the shadowy areas immune to the common signifying procedures. Jean rhys creates a referential crisis in order to reactivate reference. She refashions the novelistic form to give it access to the shadow without breaking away from "readability"
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Joubert, Claire. "Lire le féminin : Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Jean Rhys /." Paris : Éd. Messene, 1997. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb36187766k.
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Meech, Deborah. "Contradictions and ambiguity : characterization and identities in Jean Rhy's novels /." Thesis, Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 2001. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk:8888/cgi-bin/hkuto%5Ftoc%5Fpdf?B23472856.
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Wong, Tee-vee Vivian, and 黃天慧. "Between self and subjectivity: women in threenovels by Jean Rhys." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2003. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31227995.
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Gregg, V. M. "Jean Rhys, Europe and the West Indies : A literary study." Thesis, University of Kent, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.379406.
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Ng, Chi-mei. "Re-reading Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 1996. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B42574493.
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Postemsky, Diana. "Through the looking-glass reading and reflecting from Wide Sargasso Sea to Jane Eyre /." Diss., Connect to the thesis, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10066/647.
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Katayama, Aki. "History repeats itself : Woolf, Green, Rhys and Woolf again." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.327501.
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Bennett, Richard. "Variations : influence intertextuality, and Milan Kundera, Jean Rhys, and Tom Stoppard." Thesis, McGill University, 1994. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=26254.
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This thesis is in three chapters. Chapter one is about Harold Bloom's theory of the Anxiety of Influence. Bloom's argument is that literary history is shaped by the anxiety of "strong" poets at their belatedness. I show that he depends upon a subjective interpretation of literary production in order to defend a rigidly traditional canon.Chapter two deals with theories of intertextuality, principally those of Julia Kristeva and Michael Riffaterre. As alternatives to theories of influence, neither proves satisfactory. Both founder on the contradictory goal to explain all literature, at the expense of recognizing literary diversity.
Chapter three concerns literary variations. These are texts which are deliberately premised on pre-existing texts. I focus on three examples from this class of literary texts which is not satisfactorily dealt with by any of the theories I consider. I pursue a less wide-ranging approach in order to unearth important features of literary variations.
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Betsworth, Leon. "The café in modernist literature : Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Jean Rhys." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2013. https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/47862/.
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This study explores the representation of the café in literary modernism. As its primary works range from the early 1900s to 1939, I have restricted my choice of exemplary writers in an effort to pay attention to issues of subject, style, and technique in greater detail than a survey would allow. Following a brief history of the literary café, three principal chapters focus upon the following authors in this order: Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and Jean Rhys. Contextualised by the café’s fundamental role in the lives of artists, the creation of art, and the great art movements throughout history, the thesis traces the ways in which the novelists engage imaginatively with this important social and cultural space. The study is underpinned by the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Michel Foucault. From this theoretical platform I assemble a conceptual framework and a spatial vocabulary that facilitates the critical engagement with the literary representation of the café. Methodologically, the café essentially functions as a lens through which I analyse modernist writers, their texts, and their aesthetic preoccupations. Each chapter can be read as a discrete study that contributes fresh analyses, new insights, and re-evaluations of familiar texts and existing scholarship. However, as a whole, the thesis offers an entirely novel way of reading literary modernism, championing the use of the café as a serious heuristic device.
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Downes, Sarah. "Reading Jean Rhys : empire, modernism and the politics of the visual." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10722/206736.
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This thesis considers the relationship between literary modernism and visual culture in the work of Caribbean modernist Jean Rhys. Through analysis of a range of visual modes—theatre, fashion, visual art, cinema and exhibition culture—it examines the racialised sexual politics of Rhys’s modernist aesthetics, as represented in her texts of the 1920s—30s.
I read Rhys’s four interwar novels—Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939)—in the context of contemporary visual practices and the politics of empire. Rhys’s descriptions of artistic practices, acts of viewing and interpreting art, and the identification of her protagonists as both objects and consumers of art are a crucial aspect of her anti-colonial feminism. The politics of vision and of empire are always intertwined for Rhys. Chapter One studies theatrical spectacle and everyday performances of the self. Chapter Two moves to the fashioning of female identities and sartorial constructions of Englishness. Chapter Three turns to Rhys’s use of ekphrasis to question representational structures as they exist in the modernist, primitivist art context. Chapter Four reads Rhys and cinema, focusing on divided or fractured subjectivities as relayed through allusions to distorted mirrors. This conveys Rhys’s powerful evocation of themes of alienation and dislocation. I conclude by analysing what ‘exhibition’ means for those occupying both subject and object visual positions within the imperial metropolis. Analysis is supported by readings of unpublished short stories, letters and poems, works that are relatively absent from current Rhys scholarship.
The conjunction of revolutions in the visual arts and the destabilization of the empire in the modernist period provides clear space for investigation into the creation of new ways of seeing that provided a degree of visual agency for those deemed incapable of aesthetic production. Crucial to this is Rhys’s own Creolité. Situated within and outside of European visual subjectivity, Rhys’s work becomes vital to any study of social acts of seeing, in terms of individual subjectivity and within the wider systems of vision produced through the arts.published_or_final_version
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Chow, Renee Suet Ee. "Postcolonial hauntologies : Creole identity in Jean Rhys, Patrick Chamoiseau and David Dabydeen." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2009. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/54486/.
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This thesis focuses on the works of Caribbean writers Jean Rhys, Patrick Chamoiseau and David Dabydeen, specifically as they draw upon the mythic and religious beliefs and practices of the Caribbean in their constitution of individual and cultural Creole identity through textuality. The Caribbean tropes of haunting are surreptitious passageways leading to the Creole subject's struggle with the divided affiliations, cross-racial identifications and various forms of dispossession that are colonialism's legacy. As conduits to forbidden and unspoken fantasies, fears and desires, they also serve as the means of reformulating Creole identity. The study of Jean Rhys explores her agonized formulation of Creole identity as an abjection, where the self is (un)made in the nauseating identification with the black female other in the form of the hottentot, mulatto ghost and soucriant. Rhys's racialized abjection establishes Creole identity as a vacillating border state that is fraught with sadomasochistic violence and sickness. Patrick Chamoiseau uses the zombie trope to figure the loss of history, memory and language endemic to the dehumanization of Martinican man. Suppressed Creole culture becomes a part of the collective unconscious, and its uncanny return unmasks the misrecognition of white identification and serves as a strategy of disalienating opacity. Chamoiseau's Creolist manifesto is critically examined against the framework of an erotics of colonialism, to reveal the ventriloquism of the female subaltern who is made to embody the schizophrenic anxieties of the Creole male writer. David Dabydeen's work demonstrates how the family romance of the Creole migrant is erected upon the entombments of native ancestors, literary forefathers and female figures, the phantoms of which return to haunt with the anxieties of influence and the threats of disappearance and perpetual exile. His ekphrastic revisions accomplish the destabilizing and hybridizing functions of tricksterism, but also perpetuate an otherness under the guise of postmodern rewriting.
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Vincent, Nathalie. "Figures de l'errance : recherches linguistiques et stylistiques dans l'oeuvre de Jean Rhys." Toulouse 2, 1994. http://www.theses.fr/1994TOU20058.
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Bien que souvent qualifee de "simple" par la critique, l'ecriture de fiction de jean rhys doit avant tout sa remarquable force evocatrice a tout un ensemble de procedes stylistiques recurrents qui en font l'exutoire privilegie d'un esprit tourmente. Errant a travers leurs souvenirs et leur mal-etre existentiel, les heroines de jean rhys, dont il nous est do nne d'entendre la voix a travers une suite de monologues interieurs inepuisables, se presentent a tour de role comme des doubles de l'auteur, des mediatrices d'une vision tragique du monde. L'approche linguistique et stylistique, fondee pour l'essentiel sur les outils d'analyse fournis par les theories contemporaines de l'enonciation, nous permet d'apprehender la "complexite ordonnee" qui est au coeur du texte et qui reflete le processus mental ou, en d'autres termes, la strategie enonciative qui sous-tend l'emergence de chaque forme dans l'organisation finale du discours. Cette approche constitue en outre le moyen de mettre en evidence l'utilite du regard linguistique dans l'analyse litteraire, le texte se trouvant ainsi soumis aun nouvel eclairage qui revele sa logique interne et le montre comme produit coherent de la subjectivite particuliere qui lui donne naissanceThough often labelled as "simple" by a number of literary critics, jean rhys's writing owes a great part of its tremendous evocative power to a variety of recurrent stylistic devices which make it the vivid outlet of a tormented mind. Wandering through their memories and their existential suffering, jean rhys's heroines, whose discourse is to be heard throughout endless interior monologues, appear in turn as doppelganger of the author's inner self and as mediators of ther tragic vision of the world. The linguistic and stylistic approach, mostly founded on the latest developments of the contemporary theories of enunciation, brings us to the core of the "ordered complexity" harboured by the text. This complexity reflects the mental process or, in other words, the enunciative strategy which sets the stage for the occurences of specific forms in the final arrangement of discourse. This study is also meant to show how useful the linguistic approach can be in literary analysis since, throwing a new light on the text, it brings out its own logical organization and emphasizes the subjective workings that give it its lifeblood and its coherence
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Ord, Shelagh Carleton University Dissertation English. "Avoiding the soul-destroying middle: the four early novels of Jean Rhys." Ottawa, 1991.
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Ashworth, Andrea. "The construction of cultural and personal identities in the works of Jean Rhys." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.320807.
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Freitas, Viviane Ramos. "CARTOGRAFIAS DO EXÍLIO: ERRÂNCIA E ESPACIALIDADE NA FICÇÃO DA ESCRITORA CARIBENHA JEAN RHYS." Instituto de Letras, 2017. http://repositorio.ufba.br/ri/handle/ri/26665.
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Este trabalho, que se insere na categoria de pesquisa bibliográfica e estudo analítico, propõe uma incursão por diferentes formas de exílio nas narrativas ficcionais da escritora dominicana Jean Rhys (1890-1979), sejam elas determinadas pelos movimentos e processos de colonização, pela condição feminina ou pela alienação e comodificação no mundo moderno. O enfoque dado à experiência de exílio nestes textos envolve a investigação de uma variedade de espaços, tais como o espaço pessoal da memória, a experiência feminina de espaços nos grandes centros metropolitanos, os espaços marcados pela história do imperialismo, ou ainda o próprio espaço do texto. O estudo tem como objetivo refletir sobre o papel fundamental ocupado pelas figurações de espaço e construções de lugar nas narrativas ficcionais de Jean Rhys, e identificar de que forma as experiências de exílio e errância das protagonistas são determinadas pela precariedade da sua identidade como sujeito feminino colonial. Wide Sargasso Sea, publicado no Brasil sob o título de Vasto Mar de Sargaços, ocupa uma posição central neste trabalho, que também faz uma leitura do jogo intertextual entre este romance de Rhys e Jane Eyre, de Charlotte Brontë. O trabalho inclui o diálogo com outros textos de Rhys, como os romances Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark e especialmente Good morning, midnight, os contos “I used to live here once”, “Let them call it jazz”, “Temps perdi”, “The day they burned the books”, “Again the Antilles”, o poema “Obeah night” (publicado em Letters 1931 – 1966), e textos autobiográficos. A pesquisa apoia-se em teorias, conceitos e reflexões que levam em consideração as implicações políticas, ideológicas e históricas dos espaços, e concentra-se em autores que dedicam especial atenção às consequências políticas e simbólicas das conquistas geográficas pelo imperialismo. Ganham relevo o trabalho de escritores que privilegiam o espaço caribenho em seus textos ficcionais e ensaios críticos (Benitez-Rojo, Glissant, Harris, Walcott). Destacamse também os autores que oferecem instrumentos para abordar as questões relacionadas à espacialidade por enfoques diversos (Bakhtin, Benjamin, Carter, De Certeau, Foucault, Lefebvre, Massey), através do enfoque da crítica pós-colonialista (Ashcroft, Bhabha, Carter, Fanon, Griffiths, Hall, Said, Spivak, Tiffin), e da crítica pós-estruturalista (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault e Guattari). A pesquisa revelou que as figurações de espaço na ficção de Rhys permitem um mapeamento da experiência subjetiva, dando acesso a cartografias alternativas que desafiam as construções ideológicas eurocêntricas e a visão imperialista e patriarcal, propagadas tanto pelo discurso colonial, quanto por discursos literários e cartográficos hegemônicos. Além disso, o estudo concluiu que a polifonia e a opacidade que caracterizam o Caribe ficcional de Rhys e os espaços marginais dos seus textos constroem uma história espacial que, começando e terminando na linguagem, tem o poder de subversão da dimensão poética, capaz de denunciar os limites do discurso lógico e coerente da História. As estratégias narrativas de Rhys trazem à tona as incertezas materiais do tempo e do espaço vividos, histórias de estradas, ruínas, pegadas, trilhas, traços, vestígios de espaços.
This dissertation investigates different forms of exile in the fictional narratives of Dominican writer Jean Rhys (1890-1979), whether determined by the movements and processes of colonization, by the feminine condition or by alienation and commodification in the modern world. The focus given to the experience of exile in these texts involves the investigation of a variety of spaces, such as the personal space of memory, the feminine experience of spaces in the great metropolitan centers, the spaces marked by the history of imperialism, or even the space of the text itself. The study aims to reflect on the fundamental role played by space figurations and place constructions in the fictional narratives of Jean Rhys, and to identify how the protagonists’ experiences of exile and wandering are determined by the precariousness of their identity as a colonial female subject. Wide Sargasso Sea, published in Brazil under the title of Vasto Mar de Sargaços, occupies a central position in this work, which also makes a reading of the intertextual exchanges between Rhys’s novel and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. This work establishes a dialogue with other texts by Rhys, such as the novels Quartet, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Voyage in the Dark, and especially Good morning, midnight, the short stories “I used to live here once”, “Let them call it jazz”, “Temps perdi”, “The day they burned the books”, “Again the Antilles”, the poem “Obeah night” (published in Letters 1931 - 1966), and autobiographical writings. The research is based on theories, concepts and reflections that take into account the political, ideological and historical implications of the spaces, and it focuses on authors who pay special attention to the political and symbolic consequences of the geographical conquests by imperialism. The work of writers who privilege the Caribbean space in their fictional texts and critical essays (Benitez- Rojo, Glissant, Harris, Walcott) are also investigated. This dissertation also examines the works of authors who address post-structuralist criticism (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and Guattari) and spatiality issues either through various approaches (Bakhtin, Benjamin, Carter, De Certeau, Foucault, Lefebvre, Massey) or through postcolonialism (Ashcroft, Bhabha, Carter, Fanon, Griffiths, Hall, Said, Spivak, Tiffin). This research reveals that the figurations of space in Rhys’s fiction allow a mapping of the subjective experience, giving access to alternative cartographies that challenge Eurocentric ideological constructions and the imperialist and patriarchal vision propagated by colonial discourse and by hegemonic literary and cartographic discourses. In addition, the study concludes that the polyphony and opacity that characterize Rhys’s fictional Caribbean and the marginal spaces of her texts construct a spatial history that, beginning and ending in language, has the power of subversion of the poetic dimension, capable of denouncing the limits of the logical and coherent discourse of History. Rhys's narrative strategies bring to light the material uncertainties of lived time and space, histories of roads, ruins, footprints, trails, traces, vestiges of spaces.
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Högström, Vilja. "Antoinette - A Hybrid Without a Home : Hybridity in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea." Thesis, University of Gävle, Ämnesavdelningen för svenska språket och engelska, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-4482.
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The essay investigates hybridity in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea with a focus on the main character Antoinette. Homi K Bhabha's theory of hybridity provides a way to analyze Antoinette's predicament as an outsider and threat to both the Caribbean society she is living in and her English husband. The aim of the essay is to examine the alienation and rejection of Antoinette in the light of her hybridity.
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Zhang, Xin. "The problem of identity in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea." Thesis, University of Macau, 2009. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b2456325.
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Lee, Kit-wai. "Power politics in post-colonial narrative." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 2002. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?
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Karlsson, (Sunnerstam) Hanna. ""Det finns alltid en annan sida". Om makt och representation i Jean Rhys Sargassohavet." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för kultur och kommunikation, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-53806.
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Uppsatsens syfte är att visa hur Jean Rhys i sin roman Sargassohavet ifrågasätter de narrativa strategier och diskurser som avgör vilka romanpersoner och perspektiv som får komma till uttryck. Rhys gör detta bland annat genom att placera en icke-västerländsk kvinna, som dessutom påstås vara galen, i protagonistens position. På så vis legitimeras romanpersonens perspektiv och detta är ett sätt att låta den Andras röst få komma till uttryck, från det fria subjektets position. Rhys lyfter också fram att det alltid finns fler än en sida av en berättelse. Den mångstämmighet som kännetecknar romanen visar att en berättelse kan framföras från flera olika perspektiv; genom att utrymme ges åt flera röster försvåras en reducerande läsart av romanpersonerna. Romanens polyfoni är också ett sätt att belysa de olika positionerna i de konflikter som strukturerar romanen, exempelvis konflikten mellan det västerländska och det icke-västerländska, mellan kvinnor och män och mellan rationalitet och fantasi.The aim of this thesis is to show how Jean Rhys in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea questions the narrative strategies and the discourses that decide which characters are allowed to speak. Rhys does this by placing a non-western woman, who is also allegedly insane, in the position of the protagonist. By doing so, this perspective is legitimized and it is a strategy that lets the voice of the Other be expressed. Rhys also emphasizes the existence of multiple versions of a story. The polyphony that characterizes the novel shows that a story can be told from different points of view. By letting several voices be heard, a reductive reading of the characters is prevented. The polyphony in the novel is also a way of bringing out the different positions in the conflicts that structure the novel, for example the conflict between the western and the non-western, between women and men and between rationality and fantasy.
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O'Shea, Johanna. "Nomadic passions : encounters with difference and troubling affect in the novels of Jean Rhys." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 2018. http://research.gold.ac.uk/24057/.
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This thesis addresses the largely unchallenged assumption that the passivity of Jean Rhys’s protagonists is a dysfunctional limitation of agency. It proposes that Rhys’s critique of oppressive forms of power is at the heart of a passivity which is in opposition to dominant ways of being and thinking. It is argued that in Rhys’s four later novels there is a textual insistence on both the positive value of difference and the potentiality of difficult feeling. The study rethinks the value of Rhysian negativity using the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze as a presiding framework along with contemporary feminist theory, especially the work of Sianne Ngai and Sara Ahmed. Deleuze’s celebration of difference and his theorisations with Félix Guattari of minor literature and affect are used to interrogate the complexities of Rhys’s style and narrative strategies, and to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of her use of passivity as subversion and her exploration of becoming in the modern world. The thesis analyses how Rhys’s navigation of passionate dissent and morbid affects challenges the values attached to the less powerful and posits an alternative to the conventional quest for happiness. Focusing on failure, a textual death drive and the problem of female transmission, the study identifies in Rhys’s later four novels a preoccupation with the limitations of the literary text, and contends that her work conducts a ‘libidinal mapping’ which addresses the problem of complicity. It is argued that a search for the conditions of communality spans these novels. Deleuze’s intensive reading method is used to think through what emerges in Rhys’s inscription of difficult connection in numerous fraught scenes, and the thesis questions whether, ultimately, danger and negative affect attend or in fact permit the possibility of self-making for the emerging subject.
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Paul, Nalini Caroline. "Identities displaced and misplaced : aspects of postcolonial subjectivity in the novels of Jean Rhys." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/474/.
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This thesis examines various aspects of female subjectivity in the characters of Jean Rhys’s five novels: Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934), Good Morning, Midnight (1939), and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). These aspects are informed by race, gender and class, unique to each of the novels, and all involving a degree of performance and/or mimicry. Although the phrase, “Stages of Postcolonial Subjectivity” was considered, it was replaced with “Aspects”, as a term that more accurately reflects subjectivity in these novels. The word “stages” denotes progress, suggesting that the subject is at some point unified or fixed, and progresses from one stage to the next. However, the term “aspects” suggests some of the central themes to the thesis, including mirroring, reflecting looking and gazing. For Rhys’s characters, it conjures up their awareness of others viewing them, and the ways in which this awareness shapes their own subjectivities, which in turn are constantly undergoing change and flux, and are never at any point fixed or unified. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter provides a critical overview of Rhys’s last and best-known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, building on some of the key debates in subsequent chapters, including psychoanalytical readings, postcolonial readings, race, gender, representation and the ability of the text to “write back” to the centre of power. The second chapter explores the phenomenon of the postcolonial female gaze in Wide Sargasso Sea, that of the white Creole and of Christophine as a black woman. Using film theory as a theoretical framework, the discussion focuses on Antoinette’s female gaze directed against her English husband, as well as Christophine’s ability to exert her own “other” power that lies outside of language and Englishness. The third chapter charts the fragmented subjectivity of Rhys’s female characters, examining their ambivalence towards England and an assumed other culture, from which they have originated. Postcolonial and psychoanalytical theories are applied to the analysis, which explores the female characters’ ability to challenge fixed categories of race and gender. The fourth chapter also challenges these fixed categories, exploring the performativity of the female protagonists in Rhys’s early novels, in terms of clothes, hair and make-up. These seemingly superficial details convey a deeper sense of understanding about the societies in which these characters live, the spaces they inhabit and the male figures with which they interact, and on whom they depend. The fifth and final chapter examines Rhys’s early female protagonists as metaphorical zombies, using sociological research into the Haitian zombie as a theoretical framework. Despite their zombification, however, these characters demonstrate their ability to engage in life through the use of memories and nostalgia. My analyses of Rhys’s female protagonists take into account the many, varied and often contradictory critical responses to her work and themes, which result from the complex and subtle evocations of the characters themselves.
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Wong, Ching-lun Helen. "Twice marginalized women's identities in a foreign land: an analysis of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Amy Tan's the Joy Luck Club /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2005. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B31583994.
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Groves, Robyn. "Fictions of the self : studies in female modernism : Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/27310.
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This thesis considers elements of autobiography and autobiographical fiction in the writings of three female Modernists: Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes. In chapter 1, after drawing distinctions between male and female autobiographical writing, I discuss key male autobiographical fictions of the Modernist period by D.H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust and James Joyce, and their debt to the nineteenth century literary forms of the Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman. I relate these texts to key European writers, Andre Gide and Colette, and to works by women based on two separate female Modernist aesthetics: first, the school of "lyrical transcendence"—Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf—in whose works the self as literary subject dissolves into a renunciatory "female impressionism;" the second group—Rhys, Stein and Barnes--who as late-modernists, offer radically "objectified" self-portraits in fiction which act as critiques and revisions of both male and female Modernist fiction of earlier decades.
In chapter 2, I discuss Jean Rhys' objectification of female self-consciousness through her analysis of alienation in two different settings: the Caribbean and the cities of Europe. As an outsider in both situations, Rhys presents an unorthodox counter-vision. In her fictions of the 1930's, she deliberately revises earlier Modernist representations, by both male and female writers, of female self-consciousness. In the process, she offers a simultaneous critique of both social and literary conventions.
In chapter 3, I consider Gertrude Stein's career-long experiments with the rendering of consciousness in a variety of literary forms, noting her growing concern throughout the 1920's and 1930's with the role of autobiography in writing. In a close reading of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I examine Stein's parody and "deconstruction" of the autobiographical form and the Modernist conception of the self based on memory, association and desire. Her witty attack on the conventions of narrative produces a new kind of fictional self-portraiture, drawing heavily on the visual arts to create new prose forms as well as to dismantle old ones.
Chapter 4 focuses on Djuna Barnes' metaphorical representations of the self in prose fiction, which re-interpret the Modernist notion of the self, by means of an androgynous fictional poetics. In her American and European fictions she extends the notion of the work of art as a formal, self-referential and self-contained "world" by subverting it with the use of a late-modern, "high camp" imagery to create new types of narrative structure.
These women's major works, appearing in the 1930's, mark a second wave of Modernism, which revises and in certain ways subverts the first. Hence, these are studies in "late Modernism" and in my conclusion I will consider the distinguishing features of this transitional period, the 1930's, and the questions it provokes about the idea of periodization in general.Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate
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Romée, Jannert Julia. "Homeward-bound? : The Struggle to Find the Homeland in Jean Rhys´s Wide Sargasso Sea." Thesis, Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för humaniora, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-21543.
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This essay is focused on the search for a true homeland in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea from a Postcolonial point of view. The main protagonist, Antoinette Cosway, struggles with her mixed heritage which is both Caribbean and European. As a result, she suffers from a split identity and searches for a place of belonging. Vital Postcolonial concepts, such as Diaspora and displacement are used in order to investigate the struggle to find a true homeland. Moreover, the main purpose of this essay is to investigate how Rhys uses depictions of nature and colour to convey this search, and thereby introduces yet another aspect for the characters to interact with. Nature provides comfort, sense of belonging and the opposite, but also explores the relationship between the characters. The colours red and white are highly frequent, and refer to Antoinette’s Caribbean and European identity, which alters through the novel. The images of nature are nostalgically depicted and Antoinette longs for a lost Caribbean without the effects of Colonialism, which is merely history. It is also discovered that the homeland she longs for, England, is not what she was searching for. The struggle for the homeland becomes futile, since Antoinette longs for an England of the romantic novels and a Caribbean that does no longer exist.
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Joseph, Anjali. "The novel 'Another Country' ; and, 'Miss Jessie isn't all there' : Jean Rhys, spaces, and difference." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2012. https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/47820/.
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This thesis is presented in two related sections; the first (primary) section is the novel Another Country, and the second, ‘“Miss Jessie Isn’t All There”: Spaces and Difference in Jean Rhys’, consists of an essay addressing the role of spaces in the interwar fiction of Jean Rhys. Another Country follows Leela, a recent graduate, as she lives in Paris, then London, then Bombay. The cities form a backdrop to a journey through her twenties at the dawn of the new millennium, as she learns to negotiate the world, work, relationships and sex, and find some measure of authenticity. The novel examines ideas of friendship, love, identity, and belonging in its movements through old and new worlds. “Miss Jessie Isn’t All There”: Jean Rhys, Spaces, and Difference, explores the use of spaces in the interwar fiction of Jean Rhys. Recurring tropes, are discussed, among them the uniformity of rooms and streets. Rhys’s use of spaces of transition to create a liminal zone in which her protagonists can become stuck between the bourgeois life they have left, and the demi monde in which they exist is considered with reference to Henri Lefebvre’s terms, ‘spaces of representation’ and ‘representational spaces’. The role of theatre and multiple discourses in the novels to create an ‘unhomely space’ is examined, as is the way this unhomely space introduces into the fiction a new mutability which, rather than representing a simple escape from the European literary tradition, offers a parallel mode and a way of altering the tradition to include a postcolonial experience. The apparent binary opposition in Rhys’s fiction between a present time in Europe and a remembered life in the Caribbean is discussed. Finally, the intrinsic restlessness of her protagonists, and her fiction, is compared to Jacques Derrida’s idea of ‘différance’.
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Murray, Tiffany Jane. "Juggling doubles, the duplicity of autobiographical fiction : Happy accidents' and the works of Jean Rhys." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.426885.
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Lorphelin, Elsa. "Intertextualité, interdiscursivité et autorité dans les nouvelles de Jean Rhys, Janet Frame et Anita Desai." Thesis, Sorbonne université, 2020. http://www.theses.fr/2020SORUL113.
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Couvrant la quasi-totalité du XXe siècle, les écrits de Jean Rhys, Janet Frame et Anita Desai témoignent de la relation de la Caraïbe, de la Nouvelle-Zélande et de l’Inde à l’Empire britannique. Cette thèse s’intéresse en particulier aux nouvelles de trois auteures plus connues en tant que romancières, car, genre marginal et fragmentaire, la nouvelle fait écho à un certain nombre de problématique postcoloniales, modernistes et postmodernes. Il s’agira en l’occurrence de s’attarder sur la question de la voix et du discours, et notamment sur la façon dont l’omniprésence de discours idéologiques, politiques, sociaux, se trouve doublé de la présence d’un réseau intertextuel mis en œuvre par les auteures. La récupération de la voix d’autrui, et en particulier du canon littéraire occidental, dans un contexte où l’autorité féminine et postcoloniale est des plus précaires, pose la question de l’autorité littéraire. On observera que sous la plume de ces auteures, la nouvelle devient plus que jamais un genre hybride, plurivocal, aux contours fuyants, dont le genre est sans cesse requalifié. Loin du monolithisme du roman, la nouvelle apparaît comme un espace de liberté et de création où l’autorité est sans cesse réaffirmée tout autant que diffractée, et où les présences auctoriales tout à la fois s’effacent et se manifestent. Véritables lieux d’une mise en scène de la figure de l’Auteur, la nouvelle et le recueil déjouent les limites du genre, tissant un réseau discursif et intertextuel complexe, où Jean Rhys, Janet Frame et Anita Desai élaborent une esthétique de la voixThe literary production of Jean Rhys, Janet Frame, and Anita Desai, which covers nearly all the twentieth century, testifies to the relationship between the Caribbean, New-Zealand, India and the British Empire. Even though Rhys, Frame and Desai are mostly known as novelists, this thesis dwells on their short stories. As a marginal and fragmentary genre, the short story echoes a variety of issues related to Postcolonialism, Modernism and Postmodernism. My issue is the study of the themes of the voice and of discourse, and especially of the way in which the omnipresence of ideological, political and social discourses is further complexified by the presence of intertextuality. The use of alien voices, borrowed notably from the western literary canon, poses the question of literary authority – especially in a context where postcolonial and feminine authority is so precarious. We shall observe that, in these authors’ short stories, the genre becomes hybrid, plurivocal, harder to define, which entails its requalification. Far from the monolithic nature of the novel, the short story appears as a space of liberty and creation where authority is both tampered with and constantly reaffirmed, and where authorial presences in turn appear and disappear. As places where the figure of the Author is continuously staged, the short story and the collection of short stories redefine the limits of the genre by weaving an intricate discursive and intertextual fabric where Jean Rhys, Janet Frame and Anita Desai work towards the elaboration of an aesthetic of the voice
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Karlsson, Hanna. ""Det finns alltid en annan sida". Om makt och representation i Jean Rhys Sargassohavet." Thesis, Linköping University, Department of Culture and Communication, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-53806.
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Uppsatsens syfte är att visa hur Jean Rhys i sin roman Sargassohavet ifrågasätter de narrativa strategier och diskurser som avgör vilka romanpersoner och perspektiv som får komma till uttryck. Rhys gör detta bland annat genom att placera en icke-västerländsk kvinna, som dessutom påstås vara galen, i protagonistens position. På så vis legitimeras romanpersonens perspektiv och detta är ett sätt att låta den Andras röst få komma till uttryck, från det fria subjektets position.
Rhys lyfter också fram att det alltid finns fler än en sida av en berättelse. Den mångstämmighet som kännetecknar romanen visar att en berättelse kan framföras från flera olika perspektiv; genom att utrymme ges åt flera röster försvåras en reducerande läsart av romanpersonerna. Romanens polyfoni är också ett sätt att belysa de olika positionerna i de konflikter som strukturerar romanen, exempelvis konflikten mellan det västerländska och det icke-västerländska, mellan kvinnor och män och mellan rationalitet och fantasi.
The aim of this thesis is to show how Jean Rhys in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea questions the narrative strategies and the discourses that decide which characters are allowed to speak. Rhys does this by placing a non-western woman, who is also allegedly insane, in the position of the protagonist. By doing so, this perspective is legitimized and it is a strategy that lets the voice of the Other be expressed.
Rhys also emphasizes the existence of multiple versions of a story. The polyphony that characterizes the novel shows that a story can be told from different points of view. By letting several voices be heard, a reductive reading of the characters is prevented. The polyphony in the novel is also a way of bringing out the different positions in the conflicts that structure the novel, for example the conflict between the western and the non-western, between women and men and between rationality and fantasy.
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Stouck, Jordan. "The feminine Creole, identity in the works of Jean Rhys, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Pauline Melville." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 2001. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp05/NQ63457.pdf.
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Williams, Anjali Joline. ""Strange contrasts" : intersubjectivity and the cohesion of romance in the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys /." For electronic version search Digital dissertations database. Restricted to UC campuses. Access is free to UC campus dissertations, 2005. http://uclibs.org/PID/11984.
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Cameron, Louise Miranda. "Impinging upon ourselves, the construction of the self in autobiographical writing by Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp04/mq24958.pdf.
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Nicholls, James. "Drink, modernity and modernism : representations of drinking and intoxication in James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Jean Rhys." Thesis, Liverpool John Moores University, 2002. http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/5631/.
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This thesis is a study of the representation of drinking in modernist literature. It takes as its core texts novels by James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Jean Rhys. It argues that drinking came to acquire a specific set of social, cultural and political meanings in western modernity, and that an understanding of this process is crucial to understanding the semantic complexity which drink and drinking come to acquire in modernist literature. This study combines a close reading of literary texts with a historical overview of changing social attitudes to alcohol legislative reforms, popular representations and aesthetic theory. I not only argue that drink becomes a richly polysemic figure in literary modernism, but also that representations of drink and drinking can be theorised using a number of thematically specific critical techniques. Having outlined the development of the 'drink problem' in the nineteenth century. and, the manifold ideological ramifications of temperance thought, I develop the concept of 'synthetic transcendence' by way of identifying a specifically modernist response to the ideological problematization of both drinking and intoxication. The notion of 'synthetic transcendence' - which is also a radical philosophical response to the experience of secularisation - produces an 'aesthetics of intoxication' through which I read the key texts of this study. The specific narrative function of drink is considered in each of the close readings. At the same time, close analysis of the literature is used to embark upon a broader study of the cultural status of drink in the societies depicted. This thesis addresses a theoretical and analytical gap in prior criticism in that it addresses the broad social and ideological contexts out of which modernist representations of drinking emerged, establishes the intrinsic role of intoxication in a number of modernist texts, and provides critical tools with which these representations can be theorised.
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Friström, Paula. "Re-reading the Weak Other : an Interpretation of the Husband in Wide Sargasso Sea." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk och litteratur, SOL, 2010. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-6521.
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The essay is about the unnamed husband in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. About how he is depicted as the European "Other" and made into a feminized and zombified weak character from a Caribbean/feminist perspective...
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Lindgren, Lovisa. "Identitetens rum : En studie av relationen mellan plats och identitet i Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Institutionen för kultur och kommunikation, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-2827.
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My aim with this essay is to examine the relationship between identity positions and spatial positions in Jean Rhys novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Through this I wish to show how Wide Sargasso Sea problematize the analytical cathegory "women", as well as classic western canon, and feministic eurocentric readings of the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte to which Wide Sargasso Sea correspond.
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Isaksson, Terese. "Jane, hennes älskade och hans hustru : En läsdidaktisk litteraturanalys av Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre och Jean Rhys Sargassohavet." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Litteraturvetenskapliga institutionen, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-167360.
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Grizenko, Marisa Katherine. "Two drunk ladies : the modernist drunk narrative and the female alcoholic in the fiction of Jean Rhys and Jane Bowles." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43579.
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This thesis takes as its starting point the culturally potent figure of the alcoholic modernist, who, heroically facing existential despair, is predominantly gendered as male. Pointing to the absence of the female alcoholic as writer and subject in critical accounts of modernism, I argue that a drunk narrative, written by and about women, exists alongside the prototypical male narrative, and call for a re-examination of the modernist writer‘s relationship to alcohol. Exploring the historical and cultural contexts that have contributed to the gendering of alcoholism and drinking practices in general, as well as the gendering of the modernist artist in particular, I then consider how writers Jean Rhys and Jane Bowles articulate their vision of the drinking woman. Rhys‘s 1939 novel Good Morning, Midnight sees protagonist Sasha Jansen employing the discursive category of female drunk as a tool of resistance in Paris‘ patriarchal and capitalist urban economy. I situate her as tactically capitalizing, in a de Certeauan fashion, on her abjection and visibility. Bowles‘s 1943 novel Two Serious Ladies extends Sasha‘s individual drunkenness to an overarching, abstracted drunkenness that reflects the worldview of the text. I trace how drunkenness functions thematically and linguistically in the two female protagonists‘ existential quests. While identifying existing gaps in the scholarship, I also hope to gesture to rich areas of potential research and model a reading practice that explores female interventions in the male modernist drunk narrative.
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Stenman, Elisabeth. "The Silenced Love Story : The Complexity of Colonialism in Wide Sargasso Sea." Thesis, Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för humaniora, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-21553.
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The purpose of this essay is to look into how Jean Rhys describes the complexity of colonialism in the Caribbean and how it affected the colonized people and the European colonizers. Her novel Wide Sargasso Sea is considered to be a re-writing of Jane Eyre, but it also demonstrates social rankings and racial groupings in the colonial society. She does not only describe Mr. Rochester’s first wife, she also depicts the forbidden love story between Antoinette and her “coloured” cousin Sandi. The analysis will have a postcolonial approach by using postcolonial theory and concepts, for example, Said’s concept about the Other, Fanon’s ideas about the psychological effects on the oppressed and Bhabha’s theory about colonial mimicry.
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Chow, Tsz-ying Connie. "Speaking through madness : women writing madness /." View the Table of Contents & Abstract, 2005. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B31570781.
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Elkin, Lauren. "The "bend back" : modernity, sensation, and vision in Bowen, Rhys, Woolf, and Lehmann." Paris 7, 2011. http://www.theses.fr/2011PA070044.
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Cette étude prend comme point de départ l'idée que les changements survenus après la Première guerre mondiale dans le rôle social des femmes ont coïncidé avec, voire même facilité, des changements dans l'écriture des femmes auteures de l'époque. On peut en effet constater que des mutations sociales (d'ordre social) ont entraîné des mutations littéraires (d'ordre litttéraire). Pour autant, ces évolutions n'ont pas simplement fait advenir un sentiment de liberté chez les femmes. Au contraire, ces écrivaines mettent en oeuvre un paradoxe constant entre liberté et contrainte, permissivité et décorum, que l'on retrouve dans leurs textes sur un plan formel, thématique et affectif. Inscrits dans la période dite "late modem", les romans que j'examine témoignent du fait qu'il faut être sensible aux attentes qui pèsent sur soi afin de se montrer à la hauteur [rise to the occasion}, ainsi qu' Elizabeth Bowen décrit le défi central de la vie moderne. L'expérience féminine décrite par ces textes est une série d'attentes, de jugements et de questionnements nécessitant un développement supérieur des sens. La fonction essentielle de la perception, selon Merleau-Ponty, est de "fonder ou inaugurer la connaissance" (3). En étudiant des textes d'Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf et Rosamond Lehmann, je souhaite montrer que les sens deviennent un outil qui permet d'évoluer au sein de ce contexte social en mutation perpétuelle. Chaque chapitre se concentre sur la façon dont ces auteures articulent des tensions entre le soi et la société en mobilisant des sens physiques ainsi que psychologiques. Le retour en arrière— the bend back—constitue l'une de leurs stratégies majeures : plutôt que de procéder de manière téléologique, leurs textes se retournent vers le passé, afin de comprendre son effet sur le présent et d'ainsi saisir le sens de leur propre inscription dans un moment historiqueIn this study, I take as my point of departure the idea that the shifts in women's social roles which occurred after the Great War and throughout the 1920s coincided with, and indeed made possible, formal shifts in women's writing. A change in social perspective occasions a change in literary perspective. However, these shifts did not result in an unhinged feeling of freedom and liberation for women. On the contrary, these writers attest to a double bind of propriety and permissiveness, of freedom and constraint, that comes through in their texts on a formal, the-matic, and affective level. The late modernist novels I examine testify to the fact that in order to "rise to the occasion," as Elizabeth Bowen describes the central challenge of modem life, one must be attuned to what is expected of one, to how one is viewed, to how one is judged, to how one feels, how one is to love, how one is to live. The essential fonction of perception, according to Merleau-Ponty, is "to lay the foundations of, or inaugurale, knowledge" (19). Through read-ings of the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Rosamond Lehmann and Virginia Woolf, I argue that the senses become a tool for understanding how to navigate this constantly shifting social context. Each chapter concentrates on a way in which the authors considered articulate the tensions between the self and society through an attentive activation of the physical as well as knowledge-based senses. A major narrative strategy adopted by these writers, I will argue, is the bend back-- ramer than proceeding teleologically, their texts bend backward in a therapeutic attempt to revalue the present, or to understand how it came to be so, in a larger attempt to make sense of their moment and their role within it
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Hermansson, Anna. "The Concept of Pastoral in Wide Sargaso Sea : An analysis of identity, displacement, return and escape in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR), 2013. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-27600.
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This essay will attempt to show how the pastoral ambiguity is portrayed in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. The essay will argue that the pastoral is presented through the characters’ idealisation of the former colonised respectively colonising cultures and countries. This is done by focusing on four recurring themes in the concept of pastoral, namely identity, displacement, refuge and return. Moreover, the essay claims that the ambiguity of the pastoral is strengthened by the symbolism and imagery used in the novel. The theoretical framework is mostly represented from Huggan and Tiffin’s work Postcolonial ecocriticism: literature, animals, environment and Gifford’s Pastoral. The former discusses the concept of pastoral and postcolonialism in terms of the aforementioned themes and the latter discusses the concept of pastoral. The conclusions drawn from the analysis are firstly that the protagonists in the novel represent the four themes of identity, displacement, refuge and return. Secondly, although Rhys shows both the pastoral and the antipastoral sides of the pastoral concept, she clearly conveys her standpoint of the traditional pastoral concept of idealising the rural area by ending the book with a return to the former colonised retreat of Coulibri.
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Joubert, Claire. "La lectrice dans le texte : écriture et lecture au féminin dans les oeuvres de Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield et Jean Rhys, 1919-1939." Paris 3, 1993. http://www.theses.fr/1994PA030015.
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Ce travail explore le domaine d'intersection entre le texte et la sexualite, en proposant d'etudier l'inscription d'une subjectivite feminine au sein des recits de dorothy richardson (pilgrimage), katherine mansfiels (the collected short stories), et jean rhys (the left bank, quartet, after leaving mr mackenzie, et good morning, midnight). Il s'appuie sur les theories lacaniennes de l'ordre langagier pour faire apparaitre dans ces ecritures feminines des modeles enonciatifs particuliers, fondes sur une pratique de la litterature comme espace de lecture. La figure de la lectrice dans le texte surgit dans ces textes comme le trope revelateur de la nature discursive de la feminite qui s'articule a la sexuation des proces de la signification. Dorothy richardson, katherine mansfield et jean rhys, en textualisant la femme, orientent d'ecriture vers un deficit semantique, et, de diverses manieres, presentent la lecture comme un discours (du) femininThis study explores the field of intersection between text and sexuality, as it proposes to examine the inscription of a feminine subjectivity within the fictional writings of dorothy richardson (pilgrimage), katherine mansfield (the collected short stories), and jean rhys (the left bank, quartet, after leaving mr mackenzie, and good morning, midnight). This analysis of gender takes root in the lacanian theories of the symbolic order of language in order to identify particular enunciative patterns, based on the practice of literature as a reading activity. The figure of the female reader in the text appears in these texts as the narrative locus for the exposition of the discursive nature of feminity and of gender identity, bound up with the sexual implications of signifying processes. By writing feminity into their texts, dorothy richardson, katherine mansfield and jean rhys direct the writing activity toward a semantic loss, and, through diferrent narrative strategies, offer a vision of reading as a feminine form of discourse, as the discourse of the female gender
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Williams, Sandra Deena Seodial. "Destruction of the Caribbean Landscape Through Colonization in Edgar Mittelholzer's Corentyne Thunder, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, and Wilson Harris' Palace Of The Peacock." [Greenville, N.C.] : East Carolina University, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10342/2834.
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Saito, Midori. "Reading Jean Rhys in the context of Caribbean literature : re-positioning her texts in the Negritude movement and the Caribbean literary renaissance in London." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 2010. http://research.gold.ac.uk/4804/.
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This thesis locates Jean Rhys’ texts specifically within the context of Negritude and the Caribbean literary Renaissance in London. The thesis reads the texts within the context of Caribbean literature and challenges the trend in Rhys’ criticism that segregates her from black Caribbean writers. Positioning Rhys in relation to both her Caribbean male and female contemporaries, I argue for the contexualising of her fiction in the body of Caribbean literature. I also seek to unveil links between Rhys and black Caribbean women writers through a shared critique of gender and I offer a contrapuntal reading of Rhys’ texts as Caribbean literature. Beginning with a consideration of Rhys’ texts in relation to both European modernists’ and surrealists’ texts, I emphasise her different perspective on the cultural ‘other’. I see this difference as crucial when examining her relationship with Caribbean modernism, notably with the Negritude movement. Rhys’ texts are contrasted to works of specific Negritude writers, notably Claude McKay and Aimé Césaire, who were both deeply influenced by modernist aesthetics. Rhys’ texts are compared to those of Negritude women writers such as Suzanne Lacascade and Mayotte Capécia, especially in relation to their shared challenge to patriarchy and resisting the notion of essentialist racial categories. A similar comparison is made in the context of the Caribbean Literary Renaissance specifically in relation to the BBC’s Caribbean Voices and the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in London. Rhys’ ambivalence towards national identity as well as to Western feminism is compared to Una Marson’s radical feminism, analysed in view of Sylvia Wynter’s theoretical insights. Finally Wide Sargasso Sea is mapped against Rhys’ contemporary Caribbean male writers’ rewriting of The Tempest, demonstrating that Rhys’ rewriting of Jane Eyre is an articulation of Caribbean feminism.
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Aktari, Selen. "Abject Representations Of Female Desire In Postmodern British Female Gothic Fiction." Phd thesis, METU, 2010. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12612288/index.pdf.
Full textAbstract:
The aim of this dissertation is to study postmodern British Female Gothic fiction in terms of its abject representations of female desire which subvert the patriarchal definition of female sexuality as repressed and female identity as the object of desire. The study analyzes texts from postmodern Female Gothic fiction which are feminist rewritings of the traditional Gothic narratives. The conventional Gothic plot is based on the Oedipal development of identity which excludes the (m)other and deprives the female from autonomous subjectivity. The feminist rewritings of the conventional Gothic plot have a subversive aim to recast the Oedipal identity formation and they embrace the (m)other figure in order to blur the strict boundaries between the subject and the object. Besides, these rewritings aim to destroy the image of the victimized heroine within the imprisoning conventional Gothic structures and transgress the cultural, social and sexual definitions of women constructed by patriarchal sexual politics. The study bases its analyses on Jean Rhys&rsquos Wide Sargasso Sea, Angela Carter&rsquo
s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, and Emma Donoghue&rsquo
s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins as examples in which patriarchal definition of the female desire as passive is destroyed and the female desire as active is promoted by the adoption of abject representations, which challenge the strictly constructed hierarchical relationships between men and women. Basing its argument on Julia Kristeva&rsquo
s psychoanalytical theories, which re-vision the traditional psychoanalytical theories, this study puts forward that by the emergence of postmodernism, which has overtly provided a ground for the marginalized discourses to get into dialogue with the oppressive ones, the abject representations of female desire have gained a positive characteristic that can liberate female body from the control and authority of the male-dominated ideology. Thus, one can chronologically follow the positive development of abject representations of female sexuality in Rhys&rsquo
s, Carter&rsquo
s and Donoghue&rsquo
s works which promote a liberation for the Gothic heroines from patriarchal psychoanalytical identity development, which render female desire active and female body expressive, which rehistoricize female sexuality from a feminist lens and which call for a new world order built upon an egalitarian basis that destroys hierarchically constructed gender roles. As a result, postmodern British Female Gothic Fiction is proved to be offering a utopian ideal of an egalitarian society, but although utopian and radical, not an impossible one to be realized.
50
Griffiths, Philip. "Externalised texts of the self projections of the self in selected works of English literature." Tübingen Narr, 2008. http://d-nb.info/991822978/04.
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