Jean Rhys

'Jean Rhys's persistent "strangeness" continues to unsettle the theoretical categories used to interpret her work and our own social structures. These new essays by leading Rhys scholars offer fascinating insights into Rhys's oeuvre and its influence on twenty-first-century understandings of global modernism, ecocriticism, affect studies and posthumanist theory. These perspectives, by Rhys and her critics, are essential for these new times.' Judith Raiskin, Associate Professor at the Women's and Gender Studies Department, University of Oregon Presents new critical perspectives on Jean Rhys in relation to modernism, postcolonialism and theories of affect Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. She has played a major role in debates attempting to establish the parameters of postcolonial and particularly Caribbean studies, and although she has long been seen as a modernist writer, she has also been marginalised as one who is not quite in, yet not quite out, either. The ten newly commissioned essays and introduction 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 twentieth century continue to trouble easy conceptualisations and critical categories. Erica L. Johnson is an Associate Professor of English at Pace University in New York. She is the author of Caribbean Ghostwriting and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia Dell'Oro, and is the co-editor with Patricia Moran of The Female Face of Shame. Patricia Moran is the author of Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf; Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma; and co-editor of Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in 19th and 20th-Century Women's Writing and The Female Face of Shame. Formerly Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, she is now Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick. Cover image: Detail from Brassai's photograph of Rue Quincampoix. 1930-1932. (c) ESTATE BRASSAÏ -RMN