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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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The Feminine Sublime provides a new and startling insight into the modes and devices employed in the creation of women's fiction since the eighteenth century. Barbara Claire Freeman argues that traditional theorizations of the sublime depend upon unexamined assumptions about femininity and sexual difference, and that the sublime could not exist without misogynistic constructions of "the feminine." Taking this as her starting point, Freeman suggests that the "other sublime" that comes into view from this new perspective not only offers a crucial way to approach representations of excess in women's fiction, but allows us to envision other modes of writing the sublime. Freeman reconsiders Longinus, Burke, Kant, Weiskel, Hertz, and Derrida while also engaging a wide range of women's fiction, including novels by Chopin, Morrison, Rhys, Shelley, and Wharton. Addressing the coincident rise of the novel and concept of the sublime in eighteenth-century European culture, Freeman allies the articulation of sublime experience with questions of agency and passion in modern and contemporary women's fiction. Arguments that have seemed merely to explain the sublime also functioned to evaluate, domesticate, and ultimately exclude an otherness that is almost always gendered as feminine. Freeman explores the ways in which fiction by American and British women, mainly of the twentieth century, responds to and redefines what the tradition has called "the sublime.".

Aesthetics, Modern --- Aesthetics, Modern. --- American fiction --- Authorship --- English fiction --- Femininity in literature. --- Feminism and literature. --- Sex role in literature. --- Sublime, The, in literature. --- Women and literature --- NON-CLASSIFIABLE. --- Literature --- Femininity (Psychology) in literature --- Modern aesthetics --- Great Britain --- United States. --- Women authors --- History and criticism. --- Sex differences. --- History --- Great Britain. --- History. --- Literature and feminism --- 20th century western literature. --- agency. --- american womens fiction. --- british womens fiction. --- edith wharton. --- edmund burke. --- ethics of risk. --- femininity. --- feminist theory. --- gender studies. --- immanuel kant. --- jacques derrida. --- jean rhys. --- kate chopin. --- literary criticism. --- literary theory. --- mary wollstonecraft shelley. --- misogynistic constructions. --- other sublime. --- passion. --- quality of greatness. --- sexual difference. --- the feminine. --- the sublime. --- toni morrison. --- women and gender studies. --- womens fiction.