Table of Contents -- Preface 7 -- Acknowledgements 9 -- Abbreviations 13 -- Introduction 15 -- Articulating the India Cycle through Trauma 17 -- Reading Colonial Trauma: A Cognitive Approach 22 -- On Duras's Cyclic Aesthetics 30 -- Narrativising Trauma: The Dual Nature of Traumatic Memory 37 -- The Outline of the Study 43 -- I. Memory, Discourse, Fiction: The Birth of the Absent Story 47 -- On Duras's Critical Working-Through 51 -- Between Melancholy and Mourning: L'affection intentionnelle 58 -- Dismantling Literality 64 -- II. The Aesthetic Strategies of the India Cycle 69 -- Repetition: Paralleling Analogical Structures 74 -- Doublings, Homologies, Reversals 79 -- Romantic Formula: Contamination and Multiplication 83 -- Metafiction and Testimony: Possible Worlds 86 -- Breaking Frames, Creating Fictional Worlds 90 -- Accessing Trauma through Narrative Holes 96 -- The Traumatic Index 99 -- Literality and Affectivity as Powers of Change 104 -- III. Witnessing Trauma: Writing the Novel - Writing the Self 113 -- Jacques Hold and Western Subjectivity: Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein 117 -- Re-enacting Suffocated Love 124 -- Peter Morgan and the Ethnic Other: Le Vice-consul 132 -- Interconnected by Differences: 'Morgan' 135 -- Between Mimicry and Mirroring: the Double Beggar 144 -- IV. Modifications of the Madwoman Trope 153 -- Obsession in the Provincial Prison: Lol V. Stein 157 -- Rebuilding the Triangle, Renouncing Progress 162 -- Sorrow in Exile: The Cambodian Beggar 169 -- Bodily Suffering as a Mode of Resistance 174 -- Towards Forgetting and Freedom 179 -- In the Madwoman's Land: L'amour 184 -- Towards an Allegorical Interpretation 188 -- A Universe of Despair: The Perpetrator's Return 191 -- Refiguring Lost Emotions: Love as Care 195 -- V. Crime in the Salon: The French in British India 203 -- Calcutta: Exclusive Spaces 206.

Isolating the Criminal 215 -- Intrigues of the White Hermit 217 -- The Rite of Purification 222 -- Emotional Illiteracy and Stigmatisation 227 -- Between Passion and Destruction: A Male Cry 234 -- Recognition and Reversal 236 -- VI. Icons of Mourning: India Song 243 -- Towards Cinematic Metastructures 246 -- The Power of Voice: Entangled Worlds 249 -- Prologue 251 -- The Ball 254 -- Epilogue 255 -- Chiasms of Life and Death: Key Images 256 -- Conclusion 265 -- Bibliography 273 -- Index 295.