Using a theoretical approach and a critical summary combining the perspectives in the
postcolonial theory psychoanalysis and narratology with the tools of hermeneutics and
deconstruction this book argues that Jean Rhys's work can be subsumed under a poetics of
cultural identity and hybridity. It also demonstrates the validity of the concept of
hybridization as the expression of identity formation the cultural boundaries variability the
opposition self-otherness authenticity-fiction trans-textuality and the relevance of an
integrated approach to multiple cultural identities as an encountering and negotiation space
between writer reader and work. The complexity of ontological and epistemological
representation involves an interdisciplinary approach that blends a literary interpretive
approach to social anthropological cultural and historical perspectives. The book concludes
that in the author's fictional universe cultural identity is represented as a general human
experience that transcends the specific conditionalities of geographical contexts history and
culture. The construction of identity by Jean Rhys is represented by the dichotomy of marginal
identity and the identification with a human ideal designed either by the hegemonic discourse
or metropolitan culture or by the dominant ideology. The identification with a pattern of
cultural authenticity of racial ethnic or national purism is presented as a purely
destructive cultural projection leading to the creation of a static universe in opposition to
the diversity of human feelings and aspirations. Jean Rhys's fictional discourse lies between
the anxiety of authorship and the anxiety of influence and shows the postcolonial era of
uprooting and migration in which the national ownership diluted the image of a home ambiguous
located at the boundary between a myth of origins and a myth of becoming. The relationship
between the individual and socio-cultural space is thus shaped in adual hybrid position.
