Trauma Narratives and Herstory

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.

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