Authors:
Illustrates connections between the Gothic and trauma studies
Considers the ethical issues involved with reading and writing trauma fiction
Examines how trauma fiction has been influenced by genres likes magical realism, gothic fiction, science fiction, etc
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
This book examines the intersection of trauma and the Gothic in six contemporary British novels: Martin Amis’s London Fields, Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Double Vision, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. In these works, the Gothic functions both as an expression of societal violence at the turn of the twenty-first century and as a response to the related crisis of representation brought about by the contemporary individual’s highly mediated and spectatorial relationship to this violence. By locating these six novels within the Gothic tradition, this work argues that each text, to borrow a term from Jacques Derrida, “participates” in the Gothic in ways that both uphold the paradigm of “unspeakability” that has come to dominate much trauma fiction, as well as push its boundaries to complicate how we think of the ethical relationship between witnessing and writing trauma.
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Authors and Affiliations
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University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada
Ashlee Joyce
About the author
Ashlee Joyce is Instructor of English and writing at the University of New Brunswick’s Fredericton and Saint John campuses, Canada. Her previous publications include “Gothic Misdirections: Troubling the Trauma Fiction Paradigm in Pat Barker’s Double Vision” (2019) and “The Nuclear Anxiety of Twin Peaks: The Return” (2019).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Gothic in Contemporary British Trauma Fiction
Authors: Ashlee Joyce
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26728-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-26727-8Published: 20 September 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-26730-8Published: 20 September 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-26728-5Published: 05 September 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 233
Topics: Gothic Fiction, British and Irish Literature, Contemporary Literature