Overview
- Demonstrates the ongoing impact of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea on literature, culture, politics, and the arts
- Connects Wide Sargasso Sea to contemporary life through interviews, brief memoir, photography, and critical writing
- Celebrates the enduring accomplishment and contribution to literature that Wide Sargasso Sea is, fifty years after its publication
Part of the book series: New Caribbean Studies (NCARS)
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About this book
This book revisits Jean Rhys’s ground-breaking 1966 novel to explore its cultural and artistic influence in the areas of not only literature and literary criticism, but fashion design, visual art, and the theatre as well. Building on symposia that were held in London and New York in 2016 in honour of the novel’s half-century, this collection demonstrates just how timely Rhys’s insights into colonial history, sexual relations, and aesthetics continue to be. The chapters include an extensive interview with novelist Caryl Phillips, who in 2018 published a novel about Rhys’s life, an account of how Wide Sargasso Sea can be read through the lens of the #MeToo Movement, a clothing line inspired by the novel, and new critical directions. As both a celebration and scholarly evaluation, the collection shows how enduring Rhys’s novel is in its continuing literary influence and social commentary.
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Keywords
Table of contents (16 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Inspirations and Influences
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Front Matter
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In Dialogue with Wide Sargasso Sea
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Front Matter
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Reviews
“The enduring power and influence of Wide Sargasso Sea is admirably served by this collection of essays … . The volume is the first to be devoted entirely to Rhys’s most famous text and will become essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the enduring appeal of the novel. … Overall, this is an impressive collection, thoughtfully assembled. It admirably testifies to the richness of Rhys’s vision in Wide Sargasso Sea, her “right-handed” marriage to Jane Eyre.” (Andrew Thacker, New West Indian Guide, Vol. 96 (3-4), September, 2022)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Elaine Savory is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at The New School in New York, USA. She is the author of Jean Rhys (1999) and The Cambridge Introduction to Jean Rhys (2009), and co-editor of Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (1990). A poet and literary critic, she has published extensively on Caribbean and African literature and is deeply involved in the fields of ecocriticism and environmental studies. She is also currently working on a memoir.
Erica L. Johnson is Professor and Chair of English at Pace University in New York, USA. She is the author of Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing (2018), Caribbean Ghostwriting (2009), and Home, Maison, Casa (2003). She is also the co-editor of Memory as Colonial Capital (2017), Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches (2015), and The Female Face of Shame (2013).
Erica L. Johnson is Professor and Chair of English at Pace University in New York, USA. She is the author of Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing (2018), Caribbean Ghostwriting (2009), and Home, Maison, Casa (2003). She is also the co-editor of Memory as Colonial Capital (2017), Jean Rhys: Twenty-First-Century Approaches (2015), and The Female Face of Shame (2013).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Wide Sargasso Sea at 50
Editors: Elaine Savory, Erica L. Johnson
Series Title: New Caribbean Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28223-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-28222-6Published: 04 November 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-28225-7Published: 05 November 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-28223-3Published: 03 November 2020
Series ISSN: 2691-3011
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5196
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 252
Number of Illustrations: 9 illustrations in colour
Topics: Latin American/Caribbean Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary Theory, Global/International Culture