Jean Rhys's Tropographies: unmappable identity and the tropical landscape in Wide Sargasso Sea and selected short fiction

Gildersleeve, Jessica ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7694-5615 (2011) Jean Rhys's Tropographies: unmappable identity and the tropical landscape in Wide Sargasso Sea and selected short fiction. etropic, 10. pp. 32-38.

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Abstract

This essay seeks to trouble the traditional understanding of Jean Rhys's 'homelessness' through a re-examination of the way in which the uncertain identities of her fiction are tied to their geographical settings. This works towards a reading of Rhys's narratives as 'literature of the tropics,' describing not only the landscape within which and from which so many of them operate, but a literature of the unrecognised, the unmapped. In this essay I seek to complicate traditional readings of Rhys's work that reassert her liminality and sense of unbelonging to propose that it is, paradoxically, the affinity of her work with the unassimilable tropics that produces this 'outsider status.'

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Item Type:	Article (Commonwealth Reporting Category C)
Refereed:	Yes
Item Status:	Live Archive
Additional Information:	Refereed Proceedings of the Second Tropics of the Imagination Conference, James Cook University Cairns, 31st October - 1st November 2011.
Faculty/School / Institute/Centre:	Historic - Faculty of Arts - School of Humanities and Communication (1 Apr 2011 - 30 Jun 2013)
Faculty/School / Institute/Centre:	Historic - Faculty of Arts - School of Humanities and Communication (1 Apr 2011 - 30 Jun 2013)
Date Deposited:	06 Nov 2013 02:00
Last Modified:	30 Jan 2017 03:21
Fields of Research (2008):	20 Language, Communication and Culture > 2005 Literary Studies > 200599 Literary Studies not elsewhere classified 17 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences > 1701 Psychology > 170113 Social and Community Psychology 16 Studies in Human Society > 1604 Human Geography > 160499 Human Geography not elsewhere classified
Fields of Research (2020):	47 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE > 4705 Literary studies > 470599 Literary studies not elsewhere classified 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5205 Social and personality psychology > 520599 Social and personality psychology not elsewhere classified 44 HUMAN SOCIETY > 4406 Human geography > 440699 Human geography not elsewhere classified
Socio-Economic Objectives (2008):	E Expanding Knowledge > 97 Expanding Knowledge > 970120 Expanding Knowledge in Language, Communication and Culture
URI:	http://eprints.usq.edu.au/id/eprint/24234

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