Literary Aesthetics of Trauma

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vi

   PDF

2. Introduction: Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Literary Form

   • Reina C. van der Wiel

   Pages 1-22

3. Writing the Body: Trauma, Woolf, Winterson

   • Reina C. van der Wiel

   Pages 23-47

4. Symbolization, Thinking and Working-Through: British Object Relations Theory

   • Reina C. van der Wiel

   Pages 48-69

5. ‘The Most Difficult Abstract Piece of Writing’: ‘Time Passes’ as Container

   • Reina C. van der Wiel

   Pages 70-105

6. ‘Ideas of Feeling’: Symbolic Transformation in Modernist Formalist Aesthetics

   • Reina C. van der Wiel

   Pages 106-125

7. Woolf’s Embodied Cognitive Aesthetics: The Waves

   • Reina C. van der Wiel

   Pages 126-154

8. From Form to Feeling: Trauma and Affective Excess in Art & Lies

   • Reina C. van der Wiel

   Pages 155-175

9. ‘The Story of My Life’: Winterson’s Adoption, Art and Autobiography

   • Reina C. van der Wiel

   Pages 176-213

10. Coda

    • Reina C. van der Wiel

    Pages 214-217

11. Back Matter

    Pages 218-255

    PDF

Literary Aesthetics of Trauma: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson investigates a fundamental shift, from the 1920s to the present day, in the way that trauma is aesthetically expressed. Modernism's emphasis on impersonality and narrative abstraction has been replaced by the contemporary trauma memoir and an ethical imperative to bear witness.

• Virginia Woolf
• Jeanette Winterson
• Modernism
• Literary trauma
• aesthetics
• Narrative
• transformation
• Woolf
• British and Irish Literature

'...this is a book of prodigious scholarship with a carefully considered, contemporary message.' - Dianne M. Hunter, Woolf Studies Annual

• Birkbeck, University of London, UK

  Reina C. Wiel

Reina van der Wiel is Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK and has also taught English Literature at Birkbeck and Middlesex University. She has published work in Women: A Cultural Review and Scenes of Intimacy: Writing, Reading and Theorizing Contemporary Literature, edited by Jennifer Cooke.

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