Christophine: Rhys’ Le

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UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE SAN LUIS CICLO DE LICENCIATURA EN LENGUA INGLESA LITERATURA POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES STTUDENT: GRIBOFF LAURA Christophine: Rhys’ Leading Voice of Postcolonial Discourse Postcolonial literature, as part of a broader movement, springs as a reaction against Colonialism. This former paradigm can be explained as the use of brutal force employed by one country to exploit another community and obtain economic wealth. Colonialism most commonly was the abuse of native people. The postcolonial perspective emerged as a challenge to this tradition and legacy. It attempts to illegitimatize the idea of establishing power through conquest. Then, Postcolonial literature is writing that reflects, in a great variety of ways, the effects of colonialism (O’Reilly, 2001). According to Granado (2003) the term postcolonial encapsulates an inherently critical attitude against all kinds of colonial and neo-colonial schemes. The prefix “post” should be interpreted, not only with the meaning of “after”, but also with that of “due to” or “as a consequence of”. This is to say, Postcolonialism deals with the aftermath of Colonialism and at the same time reacts against the discourses of colonization. Therefore, why Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea would be considered a postcolonial literary work? This Caribbean writer first read Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre in 1907, when she arrived in England at the age of sixteen. As a native of the Caribbean herself, she was shocked by Bronte's portrayal of Bertha Mason, Rochester’s Creole wife who was locked up in the attic. Nearly fifty years later, Rhys turned the story of Bronte's "madwoman in the attic" into a full-length novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which pretty much established Rhys as one of the greatest novelists in the twentieth century. Rhys’ literary masterpiece is not just
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