Abstract
Retraces how the self-reflexive qualities of each of these novels and their participation in the Gothic call attention to the stylized representation of trauma to comment on the relationship between writing and witnessing. The oscillation between identification and distance that these authors’ participation in the Gothic foregrounds complicates trauma fiction’s ethical claims, suggesting that there should be no assumed audience of this type of fiction that is universally vulnerable, responsive, or empathic. Drawing on works by Pieter Vermeulen, Anyana Jahanara Kabir, Stef Craps, and others, the chapter concludes by connecting the movement in trauma theory beyond its largely white, Western, Freudian applications to the emergence of the “global Gothic” and envisions further avenues for exploration of the nexus between these two provocative modes of writing.
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Notes
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Cf. Peter Vermeulen, “The Biopolitics of Trauma” (2014); Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Affect, Body, Place: Trauma Theory in the World” (2014); Stef Craps, “Beyond Eurocentrism: Trauma Theory in the Global Age” and Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (2013, 2014); Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of Decolonization (2009); Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (2013); Sam Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning (2004); Jill Bennet and Rosanne Kennedy (eds.), World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time (2003); and Dolores Herrero and Sonia Baelo-Allué (eds.), The Splintered Glass: Facets of Trauma in the Post-Colony and Beyond (2011).
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Joyce, A. (2019). Conclusion. In: The Gothic in Contemporary British Trauma Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26728-5_7
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