Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea

Author: Jean Rhys

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780393308808

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"A considerable tour de force by any standard." ?New York Times Book Review"


On the Question of Identity in the Novel "Wide Sargasso Sea" of Jean Rhys

On the Question of Identity in the Novel

Author: Julia Straub

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 27

ISBN-13: 3668930511

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Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Comparative Literature, grade: 2,7, University of Constance, course: British and American Studies, language: English, abstract: This work focuses on the question of identity in the novel "Wide Sargasso Sea". Antoinette, the female protagonist of Jean Rhys’ novel "Wide Sargasso Sea", is struggling with those questions of her identity all her life. As a Creole girl, who lives in Jamaica during post-colonialism, she finds herself caught between two identities not knowing where she belongs. On the one hand, there is the black community which she knows and grows up with, on the other hand the white community which her mother tries to be a part of and forces Antoinette to fit into as well. This life between two contrasting cultures forces Antoinette into a situation of confusion and doubt which makes her question not only where she belongs but if she belongs at all. It drives her into a crisis which she is not able to escape. Jean Rhys published her novel in 1966. "Wide Sargasso Sea" tells the story of Antoinette Cosway who is also, known under the name of Bertha, a character of Charlotte Brontë's novel "Jane Eyre". In "Wide Sargasso Sea" Rhys is giving Bertha/ Antoinette a story and a reason why she became mad in the first place. The story starts in her childhood and moves on to the marriage to Mr. Rochester. The last part is set when she is already imprisoned by her husband and is setting the house on fire which accords with the story told in "Jane Eyre". For the background of the novel it is important to know that Rhys herself grew up in a situation like Antoinette’s. She as well had troubles with identifying herself when she grew up. So Rhys shares part of Antoinette’s history which is probably why she was that interested in telling her story which is completely uncared-for by Brontë.


Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination

Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination

Author: Veronica Marie Gregg

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1469617358

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As the foremost white West Indian writer of this century and author of the widely acclaimed novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys (1890-1979) has attracted much critical attention, most often from the perspective of gender analysis. Veronica Gregg extends our critical appreciation of Rhys by analyzing the complex relationship between Rhys's identity and the structures of her fiction, and she reveals the ways in which this relationship is connected to the history of British colonization of the West Indies. Gregg focuses on Rhys as a writer--a Creole woman analyzing the question of identity through literary investigations of race, gender, and colonialism. Arguing that history itself can be a site where different narratives collide and compete, she explores Rhys's rewriting of the historical discourses of the West Indies and of European canonical texts, such as Rhys's treatment of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea. Gregg's analysis also reveals the precision with which Rhys crafted her work and her preoccupation with writing as performance.


The Bridge of Beyond

The Bridge of Beyond

Author: Simone Schwarz-Bart

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2013-08-20

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1590176804

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This is an intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers and daughters, spiritual values and the grim legacy of slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. Here long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and tells us about the proud line of Lougandor women she continues to draw strength from. Time flows unevenly during the long hot blue days as the madness of the island swirls around the villages, and Telumee, raised in the shelter of wide skirts, must learn how to navigate the adversities of a peasant community, the ecstasies of love, and domestic realities while arriving at her own precious happiness. In the words of Toussine, the wise, tender grandmother who raises her, “Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn’t ride you, you must ride it.” A masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond relates the triumph of a generous and hopeful spirit, while offering a gorgeously lush, imaginative depiction of the flora, landscape, and customs of Gua­deloupe. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s incantatory prose, interwoven with Creole proverbs and lore, appears here in a remarkable translation by Barbara Bray.


Jane Eyre Illustrated

Jane Eyre Illustrated

Author: Charlotte Bronte

Publisher:

Published: 2021-01-04

Total Pages: 634

ISBN-13:

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Jane Eyre is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë, published under the pen name "Currer Bell", on 16 October 1847, by Smith, Elder & Co. of London. The first American edition was published the following year by Harper & Brothers of New York. The novel revolutionised prose fiction by being the first to focus on its protagonist's moral and spiritual development through an intimate first-person narrative, where actions and events are coloured by a psychological intensity. Charlotte Brontë has been called the "first historian of the private consciousness", and the literary ancestor of writers like Proust and Joyce.The novel is a first-person narrative from the perspective of the title character. The novel's setting is somewhere in the north of England, late in the reign of George III (1760-1820). It goes through five distinct stages: Jane's childhood at Gateshead Hall, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she gains friends and role models but suffers privations and oppression; her time as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her mysterious employer, Edward Fairfax Rochester; her time in the Moor House, during which her earnest but cold clergyman cousin, St. John Rivers, proposes to her; and ultimately her reunion with, and marriage to, her beloved Rochester. Throughout these sections, the novel provides perspectives on a number of important social issues and ideas, many of which are critical of the status quo.


Bruised Hibiscus

Bruised Hibiscus

Author: Elizabeth Nunez

Publisher: One World

Published: 2003-03-04

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0345451090

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The year is 1954. A white woman’s body, stuffed in a coconut bag, has washed ashore in Otatiti, Trinidad, and the British colony is rife with rumors. In two homes, one in a distant shantytown, the other on the outskirts of a former sugar cane estate, two women hear the news and their blood runs cold. Rosa, the white daughter of a landowner, and Zuela, the adopted “daughter” of a Chinese shop owner used to play together as girls—and witnessed something terrible behind a hibiscus bush many years ago.


Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction

Exploring Cultural Identities in Jean Rhys’ Fiction

Author: Cristina-Georgiana Voicu

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-10-02

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 3110368129

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Using a theoretical approach and a critical summary, combining the perspectives in the postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis and narratology with the tools of hermeneutics and deconstruction, this book argues that Jean Rhys’s work can be subsumed under a poetics of cultural identity and hybridity. It also demonstrates the validity of the concept of hybridization as the expression of identity formation; the cultural boundaries variability; the opposition self-otherness, authenticity-fiction, trans-textuality; and the relevance of an integrated approach to multiple cultural identities as an encountering and negotiation space between writer, reader and work. The complexity of ontological and epistemological representation involves an interdisciplinary approach that blends a literary interpretive approach to social, anthropological, cultural and historical perspectives. The book concludes that in the author’s fictional universe, cultural identity is represented as a general human experience that transcends the specific conditionalities of geographical contexts, history and culture. The construction of identity by Jean Rhys is represented by the dichotomy of marginal identity and the identification with a human ideal designed either by the hegemonic discourse or metropolitan culture or by the dominant ideology. The identification with a pattern of cultural authenticity, of racial, ethnic, or national purism is presented as a purely destructive cultural projection, leading to the creation of a static universe in opposition to the diversity of human feelings and aspirations. Jean Rhys’s fictional discourse lies between “the anxiety of authorship” and “the anxiety of influence” and shows the postcolonial era of uprooting and migration in which the national ownership diluted the image of a “home” ambiguous located at the boundary between a myth of origins and a myth of becoming. The relationship between the individual and socio-cultural space is thus shaped in a dual hybrid position.


Good Morning, Midnight

Good Morning, Midnight

Author: Jean Rhys

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9780393303940

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A woman encounters a life filled with desires and emotions when she returns to Paris after suffering from a bout of depression and alcoholism in London.


Prospero's Daughter

Prospero's Daughter

Author: Elizabeth Nunez

Publisher: Akashic Books

Published: 2016-10-25

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1617755427

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Set on a Caribbean island in the grip of colonialism, this novel is “masterful . . . simply wonderful . . . [an] exquisite retelling of The Tempest” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). When Peter Gardner’s ruthless medical genius leads him to experiment on his unwitting patients—often at the expense of their lives—he flees England, seeking an environ where his experiments might continue without scrutiny. He arrives with his three-year-old-daughter, Virginia, in Chacachacare, an isolated island off the coast of Trinidad, in the early 1960s. Gardner considers the locals to be nothing more than savages. He assumes ownership of the home of a servant boy named Carlos, seeing in him a suitable subject for his amoral medical work. Nonetheless, he educates the boy alongside Virginia. As Virginia and Carlos come of age together, they form a covert relationship that violates the outdated mores of colonial rule. When Gardner unveils the pair’s relationship and accuses Carlos of a monstrous act, the investigation into the truth is left up to a curt, stonehearted British inspector, whose inquiries bring to light a horrendous secret. At turns epic and intimate, Prospero's Daughter, from American Book Award winner Elizabeth Nunez, uses Shakespeare’s play as a template to address questions of race, class, and power, in the story of an unlikely bond between a boy and a girl of disparate backgrounds on a verdant Caribbean island during the height of tensions between the native population and British colonists. “Gripping and richly imagined . . . a master at pacing and plotting . . . an entirely new story that is inspired by Shakespeare, but not beholden to him.” —The New York Times Book Review “Absorbing . . . [Nunez] writes novels that resound with thunder and fury.” —Essence “A story about the transformative power of love . . . Readers are sure to enjoy the journey.” —Black Issues Book Review (Novel of the Year)