Reading Trauma Narratives
The Contemporary Novel and the Psychology of Oppression

Laurie Vickroy (Author)

9780813937380

Paperback / softback, published 30 October 2015

224 pages
22.8 x 15.4 x 1.5 cm, 0.31 kg

“Reading Trauma Narratives is a perceptive, timely, and challenging work."" —J. Brooks Bouson, Loyola University of Chicago

As part of the contemporary reassessment of trauma that goes beyond Freudian psychoanalysis, Laurie Vickroy theorizes trauma in the context of psychological, literary, and cultural criticism. Focusing on novels by Margaret Atwood, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, and Chuck Palahniuk, she shows how these writers try to enlarge our understanding of the relationship between individual traumas and the social forces of injustice, oppression, and objectification. Further, she argues, their work provides striking examples of how the devastating effects of trauma?whether sexual, socioeconomic, or racial?on individual personality can be depicted in narrative.Vickroy analyzes the ways in which her selected texts engage readers both cognitively and ethically to reveal their own roles in systems of power and how they internalize the ideologies of those systems.