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. 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.

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. 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.

"A reassessment of Jean Rhys's literary cosmopolitanism in terms of transnationalism and her literary influences, including an interview with novelist Caryl Phillips"--

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. 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.

Jean Rhys' position upon the literary map of the 20th century remains unstable, even after Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). She shunned public exposure and yet, desperately sought acknowledgement by her own peers; she stood away from the modernist circles of Montparnasse, in Paris, and yet, explored a radically avant-garde writing which retrospectively makes her rank among them, while her always problematic authority places her in the marginalized position of the postcolonial author. 'Writing precariously', in the case of Jean Rhys, reaches far beyond a mere posture of submission or a necessity to cope with a lack of money or a 'room of one’s own'. Rather, it becomes an ethical and political stance that engages with forms of minimal resistance to forms of subjection just as the very precariousness of her writing thwarts any efforts to 'place' her or her work, to frame her characters or label her style. With Jean Rhys, precariousness is the site where voices silenced and bodies dismissed by a gendered or imperialistic power may be retrieved, until their vulnerability becomes a dislodging force that makes the power structures precarious in turn. This book reassesses the precariousness of Jean Rhys as a distinct positionality eliciting an isolated voice which insists and persists. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Women: A Cultural Review.

Monolingual, monolithic English is an issue of the past. In this collection, by using cinema, poetry, art, and novels we demonstrate that English has become the heteroglossic language of immigration – Englishes of exile. By appropriating its plural form we pay respect to all those who have been improving standard English, thus proving that one may be born in a language as well as give birth to a language or add to it one’s own version. The story of the immigrant, refugee, exile, expatriate is everybody’s story, and without migration, we could not evolve our human race.

This study explores a new understanding of modernism and ethnicity as put forward in the transnational and diasporic writings of Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys. In its selection of three modernists from apparently different cultural backgrounds, it is meant to make us rethink the role of modernism in terms of ethnicity and displacement. Konzett critiques the traditional understanding of the monocultural 'ethnic identity' often highlighted in the studies of these writers and argues that all three writers are better understood as ironic narrators of diaspora and movement and as avant-garde modernists. As a result, they offer an alternative aesthetics of modernism which is centered around the innovative narration of displacement. Her analysis of the complexities of language and form and impact of the complex and ambiguous formal styles of the three writers on the history of their reception is a model of the effective integration of formalist, historicist, and theoretical perspectives in literary criticism.

Modernism has long been characterized as more concerned with aesthetics than politics, but Jessica Berman argues that modernist narrative bridges the gap between ethics and politics, connecting ethical attitudes and responsibilities—ideas about what we ought to be and do—to active creation of political relationships and the way we imagine justice. She challenges the divisions usually drawn between "modernist" and "committed" writing, arguing that a continuum of political engagement undergirds modernisms worldwide and that it is strengthened rather than hindered by formal experimentation.

Thematically and structurally, the work of the Kittitian-British writer Caryl Phillips reimagines the notion of genealogy. Phillips’s fiction, drama, and non-fiction foreground broken filiations and forever-deferred promises of new affiliations in the aftermath of slavery and colonization. His texts are also in dialogue with multiple historical figures and literary influences, imagining around the life of the African American comedian Bert Williams and the Caribbean writer Jean Rhys, or retelling the story of Othello. Additionally, Phillips’s work resonates with that of other writers and visual artists, such as Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, or Isaac Julien. Written to honor the career of renown Phillipsian scholar Bénédicte Ledent, the contributions to this volume, including one by Phillips himself, explore the multiple ramifications of genealogy, across and beyond Phillips’s work.

This book provides an in-depth examination of how Filipina mothers, serving as migrant caregivers, and their children navigate the experiences of family separation and reunification through Canada’s Live-in/Caregiver Program (L/CP). It analyses how Filipina/o/x youth understand their political agency, the legacy of colonialism, and their sense of identity and belonging in urban schools through school-community partnerships. The work examines the global migration experiences of transnational Filipina/o/x youth and their mothers in nation-states such as Canada through the lens of the global domestic work industry. It connects the theoretical frameworks of critical and intersectional feminisms within a transnational context to the specificity of settler colonialism within Canada, a white settler nation-state. It underscores the pivotal role of school-community partnerships in facilitating the political agency of Filipina mothers and their children, and in shaping Filipina/o/x youths’ transnational identities through equitable educational policies and, ultimately, im/migration policies and practices. This book is a valuable addition to the discourse on global migration, transnational feminism, and critical race studies in education. The book primarily targets scholars, researchers, graduate students in the fields of Gender Studies, Education, Psychology, Mental Health, Immigration/Transnational Studies, and Asian Canadian Studies. It is particularly relevant for those with specialist knowledge in Gender and Immigration Studies, as well as Equity and Social Justice Education, which includes a focus on supporting the participation of racialized im/migrants in the school system.