African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
241 p., An examination of the importance of international cross-influences between modernist poets in the Americas. Includes "From Harlem to Haiti: Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain and the avant-gardes," "Signifying modernism in Wilson Harris's Eternity to season" and "Beyond apprenticeship: Derek Walcott's passage to the Americas."
Read in the context of the Americas and the plantation system, Jean Rhys's fiction is a global vision of modernity. The vision appears through colonialist stereotypes of idle and lazy West Indians displayed in dynamic interaction with scenes of actual toil and servitude that appear everywhere in Rhys's fiction. Focuses on Voyage in the Dark (1934), the short story ‘Temps Perdi’ and Rhys's last novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
336 p, Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer are writers renowned for crafting narratives of great technical skill that resonate with potent truths on the colonial condition. Yet given the generational and geographical boundaries that separated them, they are seldom considered in conjunction with one another. The Passage of Literature unites the three in a bracing comparative study that breaks away from traditional conceptions of modernism, going beyond temporal periodization and the entrenched Anglo-American framework that undergirds current scholarship.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
336 p., Traces a trio of interrelated modernist genealogies. English modernism as exemplified by Conrad's Malay trilogy, Indonesian modernism of Pramoedya's Buru quartet, and creole modernism of the Caribbean in Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea.
Examines the work of Jamaican writer Una Marson for her engagement with the ideas of modernity and her cultural expectations as she traveled from Jamaica to London, England in the 1930s. Topics include colonialism, race and gender, modernism, and the magazine "Cosmopolitan: A Monthly Magazine for Business Youth of Jamaica and the Official Organ of the Stenographer's Association."
