Women Writing Trauma In Literature

This collection features studies on trauma, literary theory, and psychoanalysis in women’s writing. It examines the ways in which literature helps to heal the wounded self, and it particularly concentrates attention on the way women explain the traumatic experiences of war, violence, or displacement. Covering a global range of women writers, this book focuses on the psychoanalytic role of literature in helping recover the voices buried by intense pain and suffering and to help those voices be heard. Literature brings the unconscious into being and focus, reconfiguring life through narration. These essays look at the relationship between traumatic experience and literary form.

This collection features studies on trauma, literary theory, and psychoanalysis in women's writing. It examines the ways in which literature helps to heal the wounded self, and it particularly concentrates attention on the way women explain the traumatic experiences of war, violence, or displacement. Covering a global range of women writers, this book focuses on the psychoanalytic role of literature in helping recover the voices buried by intense pain and suffering and to help those voices be heard. Literature brings the unconscious into being and focus, reconfiguring life through narration. These essays look at the relationship between traumatic experience and literary form.

Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture repositions motherhood studies through the lens of trauma theory by exploring new challenges surrounding conception, pregnancy, and postpartum experiences. Chapters investigate nine case studies of motherhood trauma and recovery in literature and culture from the last twenty years by exploring their emotional consequences through the lens of trauma, resilience, and “working through” theories. Contributions engage with a transnational corpus drawn from the five continents and span topics as rarely discussed as pregnancy denial, surrogacy, voluntary or involuntary childlessness, racism and motherhood, carceral mothering practices, surrogacy, IVF, artificial wombs, and mothering through war, genocide, and migration. Accompanied by an online creative supplement, this volume deals with silenced aspects of embodied motherhood while enhancing a better understanding of the cathartic effects of storytelling.

Through exploring complex suffering in the writings of Aminatta Forna, Isabel Allende and Anuradha Roy, Women Writing Trauma in the Global South dismantles conceptual shortcomings and problematic imbalances at the core of existing theorizations around psychological trauma. The global constellation of women writers from Sierra Leone, Chile and India facilitates a productive analysis of how the texts navigate intertwined experiences of individual and systemic trauma. The discussion departs from a recent critical turn in literary and cultural trauma studies and transgresses many interrelated boundaries of geocultural contexts, language and genre. Discovering the role of literary forms in reparative articulation and empathic witnessing, this critical intervention develops new ideas for an inclusive conceptual expansion of trauma from the global peripheries and contributes to the ongoing debate on marginalized suffering.

This volume examines the ways in which trauma alters women’s identities. While some of the chapters look deeply at individual experiences, many of the contributions look to national traumas and the consequences of political abuses, including colonial subjugation and genocide for women. The book shows that language has a transformative power to change us, to give us a great capacity for inner and outer dialogues and for healing and self-love. As shown here, women have historically employed autobiography and memoir to free themselves and others; rather than seeing the limit of form, they reinvent the parameters to offer a new relationship with language.

In the last decade, the question of how trauma is remembered and narrated has become increasingly crucial in literary studies and in psychotherapy. Writing Wounds rethinks the relation between trauma, memory and narrative through readings of key fictional, autobiographical and “autofictional” texts by recent French women writers: Marie Cardinal, Chantal Chawaf, Hélène Cixous, Charlotte Delbo, Béatrice de Jurquet and Sarah Kofman. By drawing on and also interrogating recent theories of trauma, this study shows that trauma is inscribed in writing through recurring images of the body and of bodily wounding that mark the limits and possibilities of narrativisation. This book has a double aim: to offer new readings of texts by modern French women writers and to rethink the crucial question of how narratives of trauma are to be read. Writing Wounds will be of interest to researchers working on trauma, modern French literature, women’s writing or “life-writing” as well as to a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on trauma and narrative.

Featuring contributions from a wide array of international scholars, the book explores the variety of representational strategies used to depict female traumatic experiences in texts by or about women, and in so doing articulates the complex relation between trauma, gender and signification.