Featuring contributions from a wide array of international scholars, the book explores the variety of representational strategies used to depict female traumatic experiences in texts by or about women, and in so doing articulates the complex relation between trauma, gender and signification.

Recovering Boarding School Trauma Narratives: Christopher Robin Milne as a Psychological Companion on the Journey to Healing is a unique, emotive and theorised narrative of a young girl’s experience of boarding school in Australia. Christine Jack traces its impact on the emerging identity of the child, including sexual development and emotional capacity, the transmission of trauma into adulthood and the long process of recovery. Interweaving her story with the experiences of Christopher Robin Milne, she presents her memoir as an exemplar of how narrative writing can be employed in remembering and recovering from traumatic experiences. Unique and powerfully written, Jack takes the reader on a journey into her childhood in Australian boarding school convents in the 1950s and 1960s. Comparing her experience with Christopher Robin Milne’s, she interrogates his memoirs, illustrating that boarding school trauma knows no boundaries of time and place. She investigates their emerging individuality before being sent to live an institutional life and traces their feelings of longing and loneliness as well as the impact of the abuse each endured there. As an educational historian, Jack writes in a ground-breaking way from the perspective of an insider and outsider, revealing how trauma remains in the unconscious, wielding power over the life of the adult, until the traumatic memories are recovered, emotions released and associated dysfunctional behaviour changed, restoring well-being. Engaging the lenses of history, life-span and Jungian psychology, feminist and trauma theory and boarding school trauma research, this book positions narrative writing as a way of reducing the power of trauma over the lives of survivors. Personal and accessible, this book will be essential reading for psychologists and educational historians, as well as students and academics of psychology, sociology, trauma studies, ex-boarders and those interested in the life of Christopher Robin Milne.

As part of the contemporary reassessment of trauma that goes beyond Freudian psychoanalysis, Laurie Vickroy theorizes trauma in the context of psychological, literary, and cultural criticism. Focusing on novels by Margaret Atwood, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, and Chuck Palahniuk, she shows how these writers try to enlarge our understanding of the relationship between individual traumas and the social forces of injustice, oppression, and objectification. Further, she argues, their work provides striking examples of how the devastating effects of trauma—whether sexual, socioeconomic, or racial—on individual personality can be depicted in narrative. Vickroy offers a unique blend of interpretive frameworks. She draws on theories of trauma and narrative to analyze the ways in which her selected texts engage readers both cognitively and ethically—immersing them in, and yet providing perspective on, the flawed thinking and behavior of the traumatized and revealing how the psychology of fear can be a driving force for individuals as well as for society. Through this engagement, these writers enable readers to understand their own roles in systems of power and how they internalize the ideologies of those systems.

This edited collection argues that trauma in literature must be read through a theoretical pluralism that allows for an understanding of trauma's variable representations that include yet move beyond the concept of trauma as pathological and unspeakable.

The pathbreaking work that founded the field of trauma studies. In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth proposes that in the widespread and bewildering experience of trauma in our century—both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it—we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple models of straightforward experience and reference. Through the notion of trauma, she contends, we come to a new understanding that permits history to arise where immediate understanding may not. Caruth explores the ways in which the texts of psychoanalysis, literature, and literary theory both speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience. Rather than straightforwardly describing actual case studies of trauma survivors, or attempting to elucidate directly the psychiatry of trauma, she examines the complex ways that knowing and not knowing are entangled in the language of trauma and in the stories associated with it. Caruth’s wide-ranging discussion touches on Freud’s theory of trauma as outlined in Moses and Monotheism and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. She traces the notion of reference and the figure of the falling body in de Man, Kleist, and Kant; the narratives of personal catastrophe in Hiroshima mon amour; and the traumatic address in Lecompte’s reinterpretation of Freud’s narrative of the dream of the burning child. In this twentieth-anniversary edition of her now classic text, a substantial new afterword addresses major questions and controversies surrounding trauma theory that have arisen over the past two decades. Caruth offers innovative insights into the inherent connection between individual and collective trauma, on the importance of the political and ethical dimensions of the theory of trauma, and on the crucial place of literature in the theoretical articulation of the very concept of trauma. Her afterword serves as a decisive intervention in the ongoing discussions in and about the field.

This book provides a comprehensive compilation of essays on the relationship between formal experimentation and ethics in a number of generically hybrid or "liminal" narratives dealing with individual and collective traumas, running the spectrum from the testimonial novel and the fictional autobiography to the fake memoir, written by a variety of famous, more neglected contemporary British, Irish, US, Canadian, and German writers. Building on the psychological insights and theorizing of the fathers of trauma studies (Janet, Freud, Ferenczi) and of contemporary trauma critics and theorists, the articles examine the narrative strategies, structural experimentations and hybridizations of forms, paying special attention to the way in which the texts fight the unrepresentability of trauma by performing rather than representing it. The ethicality or unethicality involved in this endeavor is assessed from the combined perspectives of the non-foundational, non-cognitive, discursive ethics of alterity inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, and the ethics of vulnerability. This approach makes Contemporary Trauma Narratives an excellent resource for scholars of contemporary literature, trauma studies and literary theory.

This book provides a general overview of the life and literary career of the prolific writer Eva Figes, placing her extensive production within the various literary movements that have shaped the last century, and drawing on the main features of her works and the different stages in her production. Having recourse to the tools provided by narratology and using the theoretical background of the disciplines of ethics, Holocaust and trauma studies, together with other related fields such as theories of artistic representation, identity questions concerning Jewishness, contemporary history and philosophy, it carries out a comprehensive analysis of Figes’s main works. The main starting hypothesis explored throughout the book is that an evolution may be traced in the aesthetics employed by Figes throughout her career – from her initial Modernist phase to her more realist position – to depict individual and collective traumas. This development is a result of her need to find a mode of representing various traumatic events that have given shape to her personal and family history and to our recent collective history, from the two World Wars and the Holocaust to the social exclusion suffered by minority groups like women or the Jewish immigrant communities. This evolution will be also approached thematically, as there is a development from her early interest in depicting isolated male traumatised characters to the traumas suffered by women under patriarchal structures, and, then, to the encounter with her own suffering as a Holocaust survivor. The author’s evolution in the topics and narrative techniques employed mirrors the different stages in the individual and collective processes of recovery from traumatic experiences, from the process of acting out to the eventual healing phase. Thus, the conclusions detailed here will be useful not only to make Figes’ work known to a wider audience, but also to gain an insight into the evolution of the literary tendencies of the last few decades in trying to represent some of the most horrible events of the modern age.