Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma : The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering.
Title:
Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma : The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering.
Author:
Kohlke, Marie-Luise.
ISBN:
9789042032316
Personal Author:
Edition:
1st ed.
Physical Description:
1 online resource (414 pages)
Contents:
Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Introduction: Bearing After-Witness to the Nineteenth Century -- PART I Poethics and Existential Extremity: Crises of Faith, Identity, and Sexuality -- 1. Postmodernism Revisited: The Ethical Drive of Postmodern Trauma in Neo-Victorian Fiction -- 2. Trauma by Proxy in the "Age of Testimony": Paradoxes of Darwinism in the Neo-Victorian Novel -- 3. Apes and Grandfathers: Traumas of Apostasy and Exclusion in John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman and Graham Swift's Ever After -- 4. 'Perfectly innocent, natural, playful': Incest in Neo-Victorian Women's Writing -- PART II History's Victims and Victors: Crises of Truth and Memory -- 5. The Neo-Victorian Nation at Home and Abroad: Charles Dickens and Traumatic Rewriting -- 6. Photography, Trauma and the Politics of War in Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie -- 7. The Neo-Victorian Frame of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: Temporal and Traumatic Reverberations -- 8. Australia's 'Other' History Wars: Trauma and the Work of Cultural Memory in Kate Grenville's The Secret River -- PART III Contesting Colonialism: Crises of Nationhood, Empire and Afterimages -- 9. Famine, Femininity, Family: Rememory and Reconciliation in Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You -- 10. Unmanning Exoticism: The Breakdown of Christian Manliness in The Book of the Heathen -- 11. Turmoil, Trauma and Mourning in Jane Urquhart's The Whirlpool -- 12. Tipoo's Tiger on the Loose: Neo-Victorian Witness-Bearing and the Trauma of the Indian Mutiny -- Contributors -- Index.
Abstract:
This collection constitutes the first volume in Rodopi's Neo-Victorian Series, which explores the prevalent but often problematic re-vision of the long nineteenth century in contemporary culture. Here is presented for the first time an extended analysis of the conjunction of neo-Victorian fiction and trauma discourse, highlighting the significant interventions in collective memory staged by the belated aesthetic working-through of historical catastrophes, as well as their lingering traces in the present. The neo-Victorian's privileging of marginalised voices and its contestation of master-narratives of historical progress construct a patchwork of competing but equally legitimate versions of the past, highlighting on-going crises of existential extremity, truth and meaning, nationhood and subjectivity. This volume will be of interest to both researchers and students of the growing field of neo-Victorian studies, as well as scholars in memory studies, trauma theory, ethics, and heritage studies. It interrogates the ideological processes of commemoration and forgetting and queries how the suffering of cultural and temporal others should best be represented, so as to resist the temptations of exploitative appropriation and voyeuristic spectacle. Such precarious negotiations foreground a central paradox: the ethical imperative to bear after-witness to history's silenced victims in the face of the potential unrepresentability of extreme suffering.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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