Contemporary American Trauma Narratives / / Alan Gibbs.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Gibbs, Alan,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (280 p.)

Winner of the 2015 Irish Association for American Studies Peggy O'Brien Book PrizeExamines the representation of trauma in contemporary American fiction and non-fictionThis book looks at the way writers present the effects of trauma in their work. It explores narrative devices, such as 'metafiction', as well as events in contemporary America, including 9/11, the Iraq War, and reactions to the Bush administration. Contemporary American authors who are discussed in depth include Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison, Tim O'Brien, Lorrie Moore, Mark Danielewski, Art Spiegelman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anthony Swofford, Evan Wright, Paul Auster, Philip Roth and Michael Chabon. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives offers a timely and dissenting intervention into debates about American writers' depiction of trauma and its after-effects.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: The Trauma Paradigm and Its Discontents -- 1. Twentieth-Century Trauma Narratives: Some Paradigmatic Texts -- 2. Traumatic Metafiction and Ontological Crisis -- 3. 9/11, Collective Trauma, and Postmodernist Responses -- 4. Gulf War Memoirs and Perpetrator Trauma -- 5. It Could Happen Here: Trauma and Contemporary American Counterfactuals -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index