BOOK NEWS: New insights into the formation and complexity of Rhys's experimental aesthetics

Jean Rhys's Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics

BY SUE THOMAS

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350275799

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/jean-rhyss-modernist-bearings-and-experimental-aesthetics-9781350275799/

Addressing Jean Rhys's 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 Rhys's experimental aesthetics.

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Tracing the distinctive and shifting evolution of Rhys's experimental aesthetics over her career, Sue Thomas explores Rhys's 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 Rhys's fiction and sharpens our insight into her complex writerly affiliations and lineages.

"This book offers a virtuosic and revelatory exploration of Jean Rhys's intertextual and intermedial practice. Sue Thomas not only uncovers the depth and eclecticism on Rhys's allusions to literary, artistic, dramatic and musical cultures, but argues for their centrality to her decolonial and feminist politics and her radical aesthetics." --Anna Snaith, King's College London

Sue Thomas is emeritus professor of English at La Trobe University, Australia. She is the author of, among other books, The Worlding of Jean Rhys (1999), Imperialism, Reform and the Making of English in Jane Eyre (2008) and Telling West Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures (2014). She has published extensively on Jean Rhys, late nineteenth- and twentieth-century women's writing, feminist theory, postcolonial writers, and Victorian and Edwardian periodicals. She is a member of the editorial boards of Jean Rhys Review, Australasian Victorian Studies Journal, and Meridian, and an advisory editor of New Literatures Review: Decolonising Literatures.