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Using a theoretical approach and a critical summary, combining the perspectives in the postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis and narratology with the tools of hermeneutics and deconstruction, this book argues that Jean Rhys's work can be subsumed under a poetics of cultural identity and hybridity. It also demonstrates the validity of the concept of hybridization as the expression of identity formation; the cultural boundaries variability; the opposition self-otherness, authenticity-fiction, trans-textuality; and the relevance of an integrated approach to multiple cultural identities as an encountering and negotiation space between writer, reader and work. The complexity of ontological and epistemological representation involves an interdisciplinary approach that blends a literary interpretive approach to social, anthropological, cultural and historical perspectives. The book concludes that in the author's fictional universe, cultural identity is represented as a general human experience that transcends the specific conditionalities of geographical contexts, history and culture. The construction of identity by Jean Rhys is represented by the dichotomy of marginal identity and the identification with a human ideal designed either by the hegemonic discourse or metropolitan culture or by the dominant ideology. The identification with a pattern of cultural authenticity, of racial, ethnic, or national purism is presented as a purely destructive cultural projection, leading to the creation of a static universe in opposition to the diversity of human feelings and aspirations. Jean Rhys's fictional discourse lies between "the anxiety of authorship" and "the anxiety of influence" and shows the postcolonial era of uprooting and migration in which the national ownership diluted the image of a "home" ambiguous located at the boundary between a myth of origins and a myth of becoming. The relationship between the individual and socio-cultural space is thus shaped in a dual hybrid position.

English Literature --- English --- Languages & Literatures --- Rhys, Jean --- Williams, Ella Gwendolen Rees --- Rees Williams, Ella Gwendolen --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Rhys, Jean. --- Anthropology. --- Social Sciences. --- Sociology. --- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social. --- Hybridity, Cultural identity, Caribbean Diaspora, Jean Rhys's writings, Postcolonial literature. --- Social theory --- Social sciences --- Behavioral sciences --- Human sciences --- Sciences, Social --- Social science --- Social studies --- Civilization --- Human beings --- Primitive societies

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In a book that compares Virginia Woolf's writing with that of the novelist, actress, and feminist activist Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952), Molly Hite explores the fascinating connections between Woolf's aversion to women's "pleading a cause" in fiction and her narrative technique of complicating, minimizing, or omitting tonal cues. Hite shows how A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Voyage Out borrow from and implicitly criticize Robins's work.Hite presents and develops the concept of narrative tone as a means to enrich and complicate our readings of Woolf's modernist novels. In Woolf's Ambiguities, she argues that the greatest formal innovation in Woolf's fiction is the muting, complicating, or effacing of textual pointers guiding how readers feel and make ethical judgments about characters and events. Much of Woolf's narrative prose, Hite proposes, thus refrains from endorsing a single position, not only adding value ambiguity to the cognitive ambiguity associated with modernist fiction generally, but explicitly rejecting the polemical intent of feminist novelists in the generation preceding her own. Hite also points out that Woolf reconsidered her rejection of polemical fiction later in her career. In the unfinished draft of her "essay-novel" The Pargiters, Woolf created a brilliant new narrative form allowing her to make unequivocal value judgments.

English literature --- Thematology --- anno 1900-1999 --- Narration (Rhetoric) --- Narration (Rhétorique) --- Narrative writing --- Verhaal (Retoriek) --- English fiction --- Feminism and literature --- Women authors --- History and criticism. --- History --- History and criticism --- 20th century --- Rhys, Jean --- Technique --- Lessing, Doris May --- Walker, Alice --- Atwood, Margaret Eleanor --- Atwood, Margaret, --- Lessing, Doris, --- Walker, Alice, --- Technique. --- Williams, Ella Gwendolen Rees --- Rees Williams, Ella Gwendolen --- Literature: history & criticism