"Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys as a Postcolonial Response to "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte

Author: Malgorzata Swietlik
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640896203
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 37

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,00, University of Koblenz-Landau (Anglistik), course: Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures, language: English, abstract: Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the best-known literary postcolonial replies to the writing of Charlotte Bronte and a brilliant deconstruction of what is known as the author's "worlding" in Jane Eyre. The novel written by Jean Rhys tells the story of Jane Eyre's protagonist, Edward Rochester. The plot takes place in West Indies where Rochester met his first wife, Bertha Antoinette Mason. Wide Sargasso Sea influences the common reading and understanding of the matrix novel, as it rewrites crucial parts of Jane Eyre. The heroine in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Cosway, is created out of demonic and bestialic Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre. Rhys's great achievement in her re-writing of the Bronte's text is her creation of a double to the madwoman from Jane Eyre. The heroine of Wide Sargasso Sea, the beautiful Antoinette Cosway, heiress of the post-emancipation fortune is created out of the demonc and bestialic Bertha Mason. The author transforms the first Mrs Rochester into an individual figure whose madness is caused by imperialistic and patriarchal oppression The vision of Bertha/Antoinette as an insane offspring from a family plagued by madness is no longer plausible to the reader. In this essay I would like to focus the factors which led to the madness of the protagonist. Although Bertha Mason and Jane Eyre seem to be enemies and contradictory characters in the Victorian novel, many critics find several similarities between the two heroines, their life and finally between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. Seeing Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway as sisters and doubles is very popular with some critics who dealt with the works of Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys. Nevertheless, I would like to focus in this essay on Gayatri Chakravort

"Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys as a Postcolonial Response to "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte

Author: Malgorzata Swietlik
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640896203
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 37

Get Book Here

Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,00, University of Koblenz-Landau (Anglistik), course: Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures, language: English, abstract: Wide Sargasso Sea is one of the best-known literary postcolonial replies to the writing of Charlotte Bronte and a brilliant deconstruction of what is known as the author's "worlding" in Jane Eyre. The novel written by Jean Rhys tells the story of Jane Eyre's protagonist, Edward Rochester. The plot takes place in West Indies where Rochester met his first wife, Bertha Antoinette Mason. Wide Sargasso Sea influences the common reading and understanding of the matrix novel, as it rewrites crucial parts of Jane Eyre. The heroine in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Cosway, is created out of demonic and bestialic Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre. Rhys's great achievement in her re-writing of the Bronte's text is her creation of a double to the madwoman from Jane Eyre. The heroine of Wide Sargasso Sea, the beautiful Antoinette Cosway, heiress of the post-emancipation fortune is created out of the demonc and bestialic Bertha Mason. The author transforms the first Mrs Rochester into an individual figure whose madness is caused by imperialistic and patriarchal oppression The vision of Bertha/Antoinette as an insane offspring from a family plagued by madness is no longer plausible to the reader. In this essay I would like to focus the factors which led to the madness of the protagonist. Although Bertha Mason and Jane Eyre seem to be enemies and contradictory characters in the Victorian novel, many critics find several similarities between the two heroines, their life and finally between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. Seeing Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway as sisters and doubles is very popular with some critics who dealt with the works of Charlotte Bronte and Jean Rhys. Nevertheless, I would like to focus in this essay on Gayatri Chakravort

Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea PDF Author: Jean Rhys
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393308808
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
"A considerable tour de force by any standard." ?New York Times Book Review"

The Postcolonial Rewriting of Colonial Stories

The Postcolonial Rewriting of Colonial Stories PDF Author: Christina Münzner
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656041261
Category : Postcolonialism in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 81

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Book Description


Good Morning, Midnight

Good Morning, Midnight PDF Author: Jean Rhys
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393303940
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
A woman encounters a life filled with desires and emotions when she returns to Paris after suffering from a bout of depression and alcoholism in London.

Postcolonial Con-Texts

Postcolonial Con-Texts PDF Author: John Thieme
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847143113
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
In recent years works such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, J.M. Coetzee's Foe and Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, which 'write back' to classic English texts, have attracted considerable attention as offering a paradigm for the relationship between post-colonial writing and the 'canon'. Thieme's study provides a broad overview of such writing, focusing both on responses to texts that have frequently been associated with the colonial project or the construction of 'race' (The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Heart of Darkness and Othello) and texts where the interaction between culture and imperialism is slightly less overt (Great Expectations, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights). The post-colonial con-texts examined are located within their particular social and cultural backgrounds with emphasis on the different forms their responses to their pre-texts take and the extent to which they create their own discursive space. Using Edward Said's models of filiative relationships and affiliative identifications, the book argues that 'writing back' is seldom adversarial, rather that it operates along a continuum between complicity and oppositionality that dismantles hierarchical positioning. It also suggests that post-colonial appropriations of canonical pre-texts frequently generate re-readings of their 'originals'. It concludes by considering the implications of this argument for discussions of identity politics and literary genealogies more generally. Authors examined include Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Kamau Brathwaite, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, Robertson Davies, Wilson Harris, Elizabeth Jolley, Robert Kroetsch, George Lamming, Margaret Laurence, Pauline Melville, V.S. Naipaul, Caryl Phillips, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jean Rhys, Salman Rushdie, Djanet Sears, Sam Selvon, Olive Senior, Jane Urquhart and Derek Walcott.

The Postcolonial and Imperial Experience in American Transcendentalism

The Postcolonial and Imperial Experience in American Transcendentalism PDF Author: M. Paryz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137012188
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Analyses literary representations of the American experience in selected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Reveals the ambivalence that underlay the cultural and political development of the United States as a former colony.

Postcolonial Literatures in English

Postcolonial Literatures in English PDF Author: Anke Bartels
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3476055981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
The term ‘postcolonial literatures in English’ designates English-language literatures from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceania, as well as the literatures of diasporic communities who have moved from those regions to the global north. This volume introduces the central themes of postcolonial literary studies and delineates how these themes are reflected and elaborated in exemplary literary works by postcolonial authors from around the world. It also offers succinct definitions of key terms like Orientalism, hybridity, Indigeneity or writing back.

A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature

A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature PDF Author: Shirley Chew
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118836006
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Taking an innovative and multi-disciplinary approach to literature from 1947 to the present day, this concise companion is an indispensable guide for anyone seeking an authoritative understanding of the intellectual contexts of postcolonial literature and culture. An indispensable guide for anyone seeking an authoritative understanding of the intellectual contexts of Postcolonialism, bringing together 10 original essays from leading international scholars including C. L. Innes and Susan Bassnett Explains the ideas and practises that emerged from the dismantling of European empires Explores the ways in which these ideas and practices influenced the period's keynote concerns, such as race, culture, and identity; literary and cultural translations; and the politics of resistance Chapters cover the fields of identity studies, orality and literacy, nationalisms, feminism, anthropology and cultural criticism, the politics of rewriting, new geographies, publishing and marketing, translation studies. Features a useful Chronology of the period, thorough general bibliography, and guides to further reading

Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys PDF Author: Erica Johnson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474404561
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Presents new critical perspectives on Jean Rhys in relation to modernism, postcolonialism, and theories of affect.Jean Rhys (1890-1979) is the author of five novels and over seventy short stories. She has played a major figure in debates attempting to establish the parameters of postcolonial and particularly Caribbean studies, and although she has long been seen as a modernist writer, she has also been marginalized as one who is not quite in, yet not quite out, either. The 10 newly commissioned essays and introduction collected in this volume demonstrate Jean Rhyss centrality to modernism and to postcolonial literature alike by addressing her stories and novels from the 1920s and 1930s, including Voyage in the Dark, Quartet, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, and Good Morning, Midnight, as well as her later bestseller, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). The volume establishes Rhys as a major author with relevance to a number of different critical discourses, and includes a path-breaking section on affect theory that shows how contemporary interest in Rhys correlates with the recent 'affective turn' in the social sciences and humanities. As this collection shows, strangely haunting and deeply unsettling, Rhyss portraits of dispossessed women living in the early and late twentieth-century continue to trouble easy conceptualisations and critical categories.Key Features:- New and original work on Jean Rhyss fiction and short stories, highlighting key areas of her work.- Contributors area leading scholars on Jean Rhys from the US, the UK, and Australia, including Mary Lou Emery, Elaine Savory, John J. Su, Maroula Joannou, H. Adlai Murdoch, Rishona Zimring, Carine Mardorossian, Patricia Moran, Erica L. Johnson, and Sue Thomas.- Organised around 3 important themes: Rhys and modernism, postcolonial Rhys, and affective RhysPatricia Moran is the author of Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf; Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma; and co-editor of Scenes of the Apple: Food and the Female Body in 19th and 20th-Century Womens Writing and The Female Face of Shame. Formerly Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, she is now Lecturer in English at the University of Limerick.Erica L. Johnson is an Associate Professor of English at Pace University in New York. She is the author of Caribbean Ghostwriting (2009) and Home, Maison, Casa: The Politics of Location in Works by Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Erminia DellOro (2003), and is the co-editor with Patricia Moran of The Female Face of Shame (2013).

Critical Theory Today

Critical Theory Today PDF Author: Lois Tyson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100085261X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
This thoroughly updated fourth edition of Critical Theory Today offers an accessible introduction to contemporary critical theory, providing in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today, including: feminism; psychoanalysis; Marxism; reader-response theory; New Criticism; structuralism and semiotics; deconstruction; new historicism and cultural criticism; lesbian, gay, and queer theory; African American criticism; and postcolonial criticism and ecocriticism. This new edition features: • A brand new chapter on ecocriticism, including sections on deep ecology, eco-Marxism, ecofeminism (including radical, Marxist, and vegetarian ecofeminisms), and postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental justice • Considerable updates to the chapters on feminist theory, African American theory, postcolonial theory, and LGBTQ theories, including terminology and theoretical concepts • An extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and a variety of literary texts • A list of specific questions critics ask about literary texts • An interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory • A list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works • Updated and expanded bibliographies Both engaging and rigorous, this is a "how-to" book for undergraduate and graduate students new to critical theory and for college professors who want to broaden their repertoire of critical approaches to literature.