Rhys Matters: Critical Essays on Jean Rhys

We seek submissions of completed essays for a collection on the writings of Jean Rhys. Although Rhys's critical reputation has steadily grown since the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 and her death in 1979, only one edited collection of Rhys criticism has been published to date. In fact, given the sense that there is an emerging "industry" devoted to Rhys and her work, the lack of a collection of current scholarship on Rhys is puzzling and perhaps speaks to the challenges of categorizing a writer who crosses the boundaries of modernism, postcolonial studies, Caribbean studies, and women's and gender studies.

This book will seek to position Rhys as an important writer in multiple genres and fields of study. We envision this collection as a wide-ranging examination of the variety of Rhys's work, including consideration of her letters, short stories, and memoirs as well as the novels. We encourage submissions that examine Rhys's work through the lens of any of the fields listed above, or that use Rhys's work to examine the connections between them. We are particularly interested in essays that expand the critical discourse about Rhys beyond Wide Sargasso Sea.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Domesticity and Rhys
• Rhys and National Identities
• Rhys and Reading / Reading in Rhys
• Landscape in Rhys / Rhys and Place
• Rhys's Short Stories
• Rhys and Other Colonial Women Writers
• Rhys and Transnational/Plantation/Caribbean Modernisms
• Maternity in Rhys
• Rhys's Personal Narratives
• Teaching Rhys
• The "Rhys Industry"/Rhys's Place in Literary Studies

Complete essays of 20-25 pages are due by June 1, 2011. Contributors will be advised of whether their submission has been accepted by August 1, 2011. Please send any questions to Mary Wilson (mary.wilson_at_cnu.edu) or Kerry Johnson (kerry.johnson_at_merrimack.edu).