Narrating from the Margins

Self-Representation of Female and Colonial Subjectivities in Jean Rhys’s Novels
Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-90-420-3366-5
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 135, 212 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 469 g

Reihe: Cross/Cultures

In Narrating from the Margins, Nagihan Haliloglu casts a discerning look at Jean Rhys’s protagonists and the ways in which they engage in self-narration. The book offers a close reading of Rhys’s novels, with particular attention to the links between identity construction and self-narration, in a modernist and postcolonial idiom. It draws attention to particular subject-categories that Rhys’s protagonists fall into, such as the amateur and the white Creole, and delineates narrating personas such as the mad witch and the zombie, to explore aspects of de-essentalization, narrative agency, and dysnarrativia.
The way in which Rhys’s protagonists engage in self-narration reveals the close link between race and gender, and how both are contained by similar metaphors, or how, indeed, they become metaphors for each other. The narrators are defined in relation to their place in the ‘holy English family’ and how they transgress the rules of that family to become ‘exiles’. The study explores the ways in which the self-narrator responds when her narrative is obstructed by society; such as creating a community of stories in which her own makes sense, and/or resorting to third-person narration.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Haliloglu, Nagihan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturkritik: Hermeneutik und Interpretation
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Concern for Self-Possession
Self-Narration: Conditions, Representations, and Consequences
The Female Self in Rhys and the Category of the Amateur
Positioning Rhys’s Heroines within Colonial Relations
Narrative Responses to ‘Exile from The English Family’
White Female Colonial Self-Articulation: Narrative of Displacement in Voyage in the Dark
Colonial Creatures: The Community of Life-Stories in Good Morning, Midnight
Quartet: The Making of the Amateur and Third-Person Self-Narration
Intersubjectivity and Self-Arrangements in After Leaving Mr Mackenzie
Membership in the Holy English Family and Mad-Witch Narration in Wide Sargasso Sea
Conclusion: Self-Narratives for the Chorus Girl and the Horrid Colonial
Works Cited
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Nagihan Haliloglu was born in Istanbul. She has an MA in English from Middlebury College, an M St in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford, and a PhD from the University of Heidelberg. She is currently working on contemporary female immigrant writers in a British context.