Juliana Lopoukhine

Frédéric Regard

Kerry-Jane Wallart

Jean Rhys' position upon the literary map of the 20th century remains unstable, even after Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). She shunned public exposure and yet, desperately sought acknowledgement by her own peers; she stood away from the modernist circles of Montparnasse, in Paris, and yet, explored a radically avant-garde writing which retrospectively makes her rank among them, while her always problematic authority places her in the marginalized position of the postcolonial author. 'Writing precariously', in the case of Jean Rhys, reaches far beyond a mere posture of submission or a necessity to cope with a lack of money or a 'room of one’s own'. Rather, it becomes an ethical and political stance that engages with forms of minimal resistance to forms of subjection just as the very precariousness of her writing thwarts any efforts to 'place' her or her work, to frame her characters or label her style. With Jean Rhys, precariousness is the site where voices silenced and bodies dismissed by a gendered or imperialistic power may be retrieved, until their vulnerability becomes a dislodging force that makes the power structures precarious in turn. This book reassesses the precariousness of Jean Rhys as a distinct positionality eliciting an isolated voice which insists and persists. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Women: A Cultural Review.

Writing Precariously

Jean Rhys

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.

Lines of Transmission, Lines of Flight

Transnational Jean Rhys

Features a collection of essays that focus on British travel narratives from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries. This work investigates how the early explorers' sense of self was destabilised by encounters with the Other.

Case Studies on the Self and Other

British Narratives of Exploration

Selected Papers from the First International William Golding Conference

Fingering Netsukes

Equipe de recherche sur les systèmes d'écriture du monde anglophone (Université de Saint-Etienne)

Comment écrit-on " la vie " d'un écrivain ? La biographie littéraire s'intéresse-t-elle aux mêmes aspects de la vie selon que l'on se situe au XVIIe siècle ou au XXe siècle ? L'histoire de la biographie littéraire anglaise est-elle aussi une histoire des rapports entre vérité et fiction ? La limite entre récit de vie et roman a-t-elle toujours été la même ? De la biographie de John Donne par Izaak Walton ou de celle de Samuel Johnson par James Boswell, jusqu'aux biographies postmodernes de Burgess, Ackroyd ou Motion, les auteurs se sont attachés à retracer ces configurations du soi artistique. Les enjeux sont multiples : la définition du sujet, la fonction " auteur ", la différence sexuelle, l'éthique de la poétique sont notamment de ceux qui ont motivé cette recherche.

XVIIe-XXe siècles : configurations, reconfigurations du soi artistique

La biographie littéraire en Angleterre

"A reassessment of Jean Rhys's literary cosmopolitanism in terms of transnationalism and her literary influences, including an interview with novelist Caryl Phillips"--

Le savoir de soi ne dépendrait-il pas d'un savoir géographique ? Sur les traces de philosophes comme Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze ou Michel de Certeau, mais aussi en explorant des voies ouvertes par des géographes " postmodernes " comme Henri Lefebvre ou Edward Soja, on a voulu chercher ici non l'origine du sujet autobiographique, mais son tracé, ses cheminements, ses frontières, ses parages, ses territoires. On a voulu dessiner une histoire de ces cartes " utopiques " du soi autobiographique : non pas l'essence du sujet, donc, mais ses plans d'immanence, ses espaces, ses contours, et donc aussi ses figures. De Margaret Cavendish et David Hume à Doris Lessing et Janet Frame, en passant par Fielding, Wordsworth, Margaret Oliphant, le cardinal Newman, Robert Graves, Leonard Woolf, Jean Rhys ou encore Sean O'Faolain, le soi de l'auteur se met en place, conjuguant topologie et tropologie, produisant le " je " dans une inscription géographique.

géographies du soi

L'autobiographie littéraire en Angleterre, XVIIe-XXe siècles

Comment peut-on expliquer l'exceptionnelle richesse théâtrale de la période élisabéthaine ? Dans quelle mesure le rejet du rationalisme de l'époque néoclassique engendre-t-il un ensemble d'œuvres dont la philosophie et l'esthétique sont empreintes d'une sensibilité romantique ? Quelles sont les caractéristique du magical realism et qui en sont les maîtres ? Ce manuel offre un panorama complet de l'histoire de la littérature anglaise, resituée dans le contexte de chaque époque, depuis les premiers textes anglo-saxons jusqu'aux expériences du postmodernisme et du postcolonialisme. Apportant des éclairages précis sur chaque genre (roman, poésie, théâtre), il met en lumière les auteurs incontournables et les œuvres-clé.

Histoire de la littérature anglaise

naissance de l'oeuvre romanesque de William Golding

Ethique et esthétique des ténèbres

Space, Identity, Discourse in British Auto/biography

Mapping the Self

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.

Frédéric Regard

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