Stef Craps

Postcolonial Witnessing argues that the suffering engendered by colonialism needs to be acknowledged more fully, on its own terms, in its own terms, and in relation to traumatic First World histories if trauma theory is to have any hope of redeeming its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement.

Trauma Out of Bounds

Postcolonial Witnessing

Shows how the novels elaborate an ethics of alterity by means of a detailed study of one of Swift's most persistent and fascinating -- yet all too often ignored -- concerns: the traumatic experience of reality. Swift's texts evoke the cultural pathologies of a nation (post-war Britain) and an era (modernity) through the narratives of individual characters who are struggling to come to terms with a traumatic personal and collective past. By providing a wide-ranging and in-depth analysis of Swift's novels against the background of the 'ethical turn' in literary studies and the emergence of trauma theory, this book extends and enriches our understanding of what is arguably one of the most significant literary oeuvres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

No Short-cuts to Salvation

Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift

Lucy Bond

Trauma has become a catchword of our time and a central category in contemporary theory and criticism. In this illuminating and accessible volume, Lucy Bond and Stef Craps: provide an account of the history of the concept of trauma from the late nineteenth century to the present day examine debates around the term in their historical and cultural contexts trace the origins and growth of literary trauma theory introduce the reader to key thinkers in the field explore important issues and tensions in the study of trauma as a cultural phenomenon outline and assess recent critiques and revisions of cultural trauma research Trauma is an essential guide to a rich and vibrant area of literary and cultural inquiry.

Trauma

Pieter Vermeulen

Though still a relatively young field, memory studies has undergone significant transformations since it first coalesced as an area of inquiry. Increasingly, scholars understand memory to be a fluid, dynamic, unbound phenomenon—a process rather than a reified object. Embodying just such an elastic approach, this state-of-the-field collection systematically explores the transcultural, transgenerational, transmedial, and transdisciplinary dimensions of memory—four key dynamics that have sometimes been studied in isolation but never in such an integrated manner. Memory Unbound places leading researchers in conversation with emerging voices in the field to recast our understanding of memory’s distinctive variability.

Stef Craps

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