Neo-Victorian tropes of trauma : : the politics of bearing after-witness to nineteenth-century suffering / / edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben.

• Superior document: Neo-Victorian series ; 1
• TeilnehmendeR: Kohlke, Marie-Luise.; Gutleben, Christian.
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Neo-Victorian series ; 1.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (414 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

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.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Bearing After-Witness to the Nineteenth Century / Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben -- Postmodernism Revisited : The Ethical Drive of Postmodern Trauma in Neo-Victorian Fiction / Christian Gutleben and Julian Wolfreys -- Trauma by Proxy in the “Age of Testimony”: Paradoxes of Darwinism in the Neo-Victorian Novel / Georges Letissier -- Apes and Grandfathers: Traumas of Apostasy and Exclusion in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Graham Swift’s Ever After / Catherine Pesso-Miquel -- ‘Perfectly innocent, natural, playful’: Incest in Neo-Victorian Women’s Writing / Mark Llewellyn -- The Neo-Victorian Nation at Home and Abroad: Charles Dickens and Traumatic Rewriting / Dianne F. Sadoff -- Photography, Trauma and the Politics of War in Beryl Bainbridge’s Master Georgie / Vanessa Guignery -- The Neo-Victorian Frame of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: Temporal and Traumatic Reverberations / Celia Wallhead and Marie-Luise Kohlke -- Australia’s ‘Other’ History Wars: Trauma and the Work of Cultural Memory in Kate Grenville’s The Secret River / Kate Mitchell -- Famine, Femininity, Family: Rememory and Reconciliation in Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You / Ann Heilmann -- Unmanning Exoticism: The Breakdown of Christian Manliness in The Book of the Heathen / Elisabeth Wesseling -- Turmoil, Trauma and Mourning in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool / Elodie Rousselot -- Tipoo’s Tiger on the Loose: Neo-Victorian Witness-Bearing and the Trauma of the Indian Mutiny / Marie-Luise Kohlke -- Contributors -- Index.