Trauma Narratives and Herstory

by Andermahr, Sonya; Pellicer-Ortín, Silvia

• ISBN13: 9781137268341
• ISBN10: 1137268344
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-04-19
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book draws together international scholars to examine the representation of female trauma and women's version of history in contemporary literature and culture. Focusing on texts by or about women, the book explores the variety of representational strategies used to depict female traumatic experiences, and articulates the complex relation between trauma, gender and signification. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to trauma, the authors analyse a range of genres including fictional texts, autobiography, comics and film. Writers discussed include: Alice Walker, Eva Figes, Cristina García, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Dorothy Allison, Diane Noomin and Maxine Hong Kingston, among others. Demonstrating a rich plurality of perspectives, the volume sheds light on the power of literature and art to enable minority subjects to come to terms with loss and trauma.

Author Biography

Sonya Andermahr is Reader in English at the University of Northampton, UK. She has written widely on contemporary British and American women's writing. Her publications include Jeanette Winterson (2009), Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide (2007) and, with Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz, A Glossary of Feminist Theory (2000). Her current research interest lies in female trauma narratives with a particular focus on narratives of maternal loss in contemporary women's writing. She has also co-edited (with Lawrence Phillips) Angela Carter: New Critical Readings (2012).

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín wrote her PhD thesis on the work of Eva Figes as a Research Fellow at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, and is currently a member 'Contemporary Narrative in English', a research team at that university. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Universities of Cambridge and Reading and has delivered many papers related to her main fields of research, Trauma and Holocaust Studies, British-Jewish writers, autobiography and feminism. She is the author of several articles dealing with these issues, and she has contributed, with Sonya Andermahr, to a special issue of the journal Critical Engagements, on the work of the writer Eva Figes.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Trauma Narratives and Herstory; Sonya Andermahr and Silvia Pellicer-Ortín
PART I: TRAUMA AS DISLOCATION IN FEMALE NARRATIVES
1. 'Compulsively readable and deeply moving': Women's Middlebrow Trauma Fiction; Sonya Andermahr
2. Dislocations and Traumas in Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban and Loida Martiza Pérez's Geographies of Home; Simone A. Aguiar
3. Trauma, Female Identity and the Trope of Splitness in Figes, Lessing, Tennant and Weldon; Olga Glebova
4. Of Grandmothers and Bad Wolves: Fairy Tale, Myth and Trauma in Eva Figes' Tales of Innocence and Experience; Julia Tofantšuk
PART II: TRAUMA NARRATIVES AND FEMALE SURVIVAL STRATEGIES
5. Trauma and Survival in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, or the power of alternative stories; Mélanie Grué
6. Overcoming Double Victimization in Alice Walker's The Color Purple, or the self-healing power of writing 'Herstory'; Valérie Croisille
7. 'Locking the Door': Self-Deception, Silence and Survival in Alice Munro's 'Vandals'; Corinne Bigot
PART III: THE REWRITING OF HISTORY IN TRAUMA HERSTORIES
8. 'Stories never told': Canonicity, History and 'Herstory' in Dan Jacobson's Her Story and The God-Fearer; David Brauner
9. Herstory Unwritten: Trauma, Memory, Identity and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved; Emma Domínguez Rué
10. Depathologising Racial Melancholia in Intergenerational Herstories; Hannah Ho Ming Yit
PART IV: TRAUMA AND HERSTORY IN VISUAL CULTURES
11. Psychic resilience in the fragile images of A Petal: a post-Jungian perspective on retraumatisation; Emily Ashman
12. Wit(h)nessing Trauma in Keisuke Kinoshita's Twenty-Four Eyes; Claudia Lindner Leporda
13. Cartoon Tears: Diane Noomin's Baby Talk: A Tale of Four Miscarriages; Sarah Lightman