Carol Dell'amico

Postcolonial Rhys: the Modernist Period Carol Dell'amico

The Anglo-Caribbean, British author Jean Rhys, who published the bulk of her writing between 1927 and 1939, has long been thought to have achieved success as a postcolonial writer only in her last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). In this view, the substantial colonial content of the preceding fictions, which include four additional novels, is mostly ignored. This opinion holds amongst prominent Rhys scholars even though many of the these fictions have Caribbean settings and characters like Wide Sargasso Sea. This study revises this prominent view of Rhys. The colonial content of the four novels preceding Wide Sargasso Sea is revisited, and Rhys's abiding interest in imperial identities and cultures, and her postcolonial engagement with the work of central modernist writers and forms, including Joseph Conrad and the flaneur novel, are presented. This study's close readings of Rhys's modernist period novels will be of interest to academics working in the areas of postcolonial, Caribbean, and twentieth-century British literary studies.