"Like Islands in the Sea’: Intermingled Consciousness and the Politics of the Self in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Late Stories"

Cécile Roudeau (1)

1 LARCA UMR 8225 - Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones

This essay investigates Sarah Orne Jewett and William James’s shared interest in reconfiguring modes of relationality between “selves” at the turn of the century. It examines two of Jewett’s late stories, “The Foreigner” and “The Queen’s Twin,” as responses to a problem James also addressed in his interventions on the Philippine crisis, the imperial turn of US politics, and the ensuing changes in cognitive patterns of selfhood. Not unlike James, Jewett psychologized imperialism, but she did so through a literary reworking of the borders of her regionalist tales. To experiment with alternative modalities of transoceanic consciousness in her fiction, she used the language of regionalism as a privileged medium where such psychological, political, and cognitive reconfigurations could best be tried out.

Domaines: Littératures; Histoire

Cécile Roudeau. "Like Islands in the Sea’: Intermingled Consciousness and the Politics of the Self in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Late Stories". William James Studies, 2017, 13 (2), pp.190-216. ⟨hal-03247598⟩