Book News: Charting new territories in Rhys studies

Transnational Jean Rhys: Lines of Transmission, Lines of Flight

Edited by Juliana Lopoukhine, Frédéric Regard, and Kerry-Jane Wallart

Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

ISBN: 9781501371653

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/transnational-jean-rhys-9781501371653/

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.

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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.

Juliana Lopoukhine is senior lecturer in English studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France. She has published various chapters and articles on women modernist writers (Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Rose Macaulay), a critical edition of Mrs Dalloway (2013), and co-edited three issues of L’Atelier (2016, 2019, 2020). She wrote her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Chantal Delourme and Scott McCracken and received her PhD from the Université de Paris-Nanterre, France and Keele University, UK.

Frédéric Regard is professor of 19th- and 20th-century English literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France. He is the author of books on William Golding, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and 'feminine writing', as well as countless peer-reviewed articles. He also edited collections of essays on life-writing and exploration narratives. His latest work, Le Détective était une femme (2018), bears on gender issues in the genesis of the detective novel as a genre.

Kerry-Jane Wallart is professor in Black Atlantic studies at the University of Orléans, France. Her Alma Mater is the École Normale Supérieure Ulm and she has been a Procter Fellow at Princeton University. She has published over 30 book chapters and articles, co-edited an issue of Sillages Critiques (2019), an issue of Revue de Littérature Comparée (2017), a volume on Jamaica Kincaid, published by Wagadu in 2018, and edited three issues of Commonwealth Essays and Studies (2019, 2012 and 2009).