Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma

' What a bold, scintillating, and provocative study! Moran' s work on the aesthetics of trauma in Woolf and Rhys makes a significant contribution to the field of modernist inquiry and trauma studies. Grounded in a feminist critique of shame and masochism, this book sends Woolf' s phantom ' Angel in the House' packing and definitively evicts corporeal anxiety and creative guilt from the house of women' s fiction. ' - Suzette Henke, Thruston B. Morton Professor of English, University of Louisville

' With its focus on sexual trauma as a cause for a differing aesthetics, Moran' s study stands as an extremely important contribution to the critical literary fields of modernist female aesthetics and sexual trauma. Moran supports and extends critical work such as Suzette Henke' s Shattered Subjects (1998), Doane' s and Hodges' s Telling Incest (2001), and Miriam Fuchs' s The Text is Myself (2004). She brings a larger and more particular scope to these studies, by extensively connecting Woolf' s and Rhys' s ' damage' to psychoanalytic theories, sexology, and abuse survival. Moran understands both Woolf' s and Rhys' s traumas through a focus on early 20th-century psychoanalysis. She places Woolf' s work on sexuality in contrast with the contemporaneous work on sexology and reads Rhys' s trauma through theories of childhood abuse. With its intrepid investigations into an ' aesthetics of damage, ' this is an ambitious and successful book. " - Georgia Johnston, Associate Professor of English, Saint Louis University