Contemporary American Trauma Narratives (Hardcover)

Trauma has become an important and influential paradigm for reading contemporary American literature. Conventional critical models of the phenomenon however often result in formulaic and cliched interpretations. This book breaks away from understanding trauma defined solely and narrowly according to psychoanalytic theories. Instead, it incorporates theories drawn from other fields, such as narratology, in order to analyse specific devices characteristically employed by writers in order to represent and, often, to mimic the effects of trauma. The author also focuses on important issues ignored or underplayed by conventional theoretical understandings of trauma, such as the characteristics and effects of perpetrator narratives. The book is grouped around narrative devices and innovations, such as the metafictional inscription of the narrator into the text, and around important thematic concerns such as 9/11, the Iraq War, and reactions to the Bush administration."