Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift - No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Hardcover)

This book offers a critical reading of the novels of Graham Swift in light of recent developments in literary theory and criticism. It shows how the novels elaborate an ethics of alterity by means of a detailed study of one of Swifts most persistent and fascinating yet all too often ignored concerns: the traumatic experience of reality. Swifts texts evoke the cultural pathologies of a nation (post-war Britain) and an era (modernity) through the narratives of individual characters who are struggling to come to terms with a traumatic personal and collective past. The author charts the entire trajectory of Swifts engagement with the perils, pitfalls and possibilities of navigating a post-traumatic condition, proceeding from an emphasis on denial in his early work, through an intense preoccupation with the demands of trauma in the middle-period novels (including Waterland), to a liberating insistence on regeneration and renewal in Last Orders and The Light of Day. By providing a w