Jean Rhys's Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics

Addressing Jean Rhyss composition and positioning of her fiction, this book invites and challenges us to read the tacit, silent and explicit textual bearings she offers and reveals new insights about the formation, scope and complexity of Rhyss experimental aesthetics. Tracing the distinctive and shifting evolution of Rhyss experimental aesthetics over her career, Sue Thomas explores Rhyss practices of composition in her fiction and drafts, as well as her self-reflective comment on her writing. The author examines patterns of interrelation, intertextuality, intermediality and allusion, both diachronic and synchronic, as well as the cultural histories entwined within them. Through close analysis of these, this book reveals new experimental, thematic, generic and political reaches of Rhyss fiction and sharpens our insight into her complex writerly affiliations and lineages.