Introduction: Trauma and the Autobiographical

Abstract

This book explores how a number of women writers, who became caught up in different ways in the First and Second World Wars, explored the personal and historical impact of these events in autobiographical writings. I consider the ways in which these writers negotiated subject positions for themselves in the light of circumstances which were often either psychologically or physically threatening. I do not set out to produce quantitative or qualitative comparisons between degrees of distress or suffering; in selecting writers from different historical and national contexts I intend to show how their responses were shaped by these local specificities, but the vocabulary of contemporary psychoanalytic theory can also assist in elucidating the narrative structures they employ. Before moving on to describe the current theoretical debates which I have found useful in exploring these texts it will be worth briefly outlining how the literature of the two world wars, and specifically women’s literature, has been approached in recent criticism.