Overview

The first decades of the twenty-first century have been beset by troubling social realities: coalition warfare, global terrorism and financial crisis, climate change, epidemics of family violence, violence toward women, addiction, neo-colonialism, continuing racial and religious conflict. While traumas involving large-scale or historical violence are widely represented in trauma theory, familial trauma is still largely considered a private matter, associated with personal failure. This book contributes to the emerging field of feminist trauma theory by bringing focus to works that contest this tendency, offering new understandings of the significance of the literary testimony and its relationship to broader society. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma adopts an interdisciplinary approach in examining how the literary testimony of familial transgenerational trauma, with its affective and relational contagion, illuminates transmissive cycles of trauma that have consequences across cultures and generations. It offers bold and insightful readings of works that explore those consequences in story—Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), Hélène Cixous's Hyperdream (2009), Marguerite Duras's The Lover (1992), Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy (1999), and Alexis Wright's Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), concluding that such testimony constitutes a fundamentally feminist experiment and encounter. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma challenges the casting of familial trauma in ahistorical terms, and affirms both trauma and writing as social forces of political import.

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9781501330872

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Not since For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Childrearing have I encountered a book that politicises familial violence and provides routes into and out of the traumatic and traumatising arrangements of forces, which are routinely part of family lives. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma is a feminist experiment and encounter, staging literary testimonies of trauma and relational violence at the dynamic intersection of affect and trauma studies, and subject, text and society. It is inventive, urgent, important and highly original. Meera Atkinson helps to define a new genre of writing that transfigures the lived experience of violence captured in literary testimonies into an urgent political category that captivates and allows the proliferation of new visibilities and intelligibilities. * Lisa Blackman, Co-Head of Media and Communications Department, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK * Breaking through the collective denial of the social effects of increased family and partner violence, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma develops close readings of literary texts that figure the 'cyclical haunting' of familial trauma. Atkinson's book makes a strong case for using the sensory intimacy of literature as a tool to overcome the communicative impasse of traumatic silences. It mobilizes a feminist perspective to explore the intersections of body studies and affect theory and makes a timely contribution to trauma studies and theory as well as literary studies. * Gabriele Schwab, Chancellor's Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, USA * The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma is a theoretically robust, fluently written argument for the importance of `literary testimony' and will quickly establish itself as necessary reading for scholars interested in the relationship of poetics, trauma and witnessing. Its commitment to interdisciplinary reading is a clear strength, showing especially in its engagement with questions of the environment and non-human animals. * Jane Kilby, Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies, University of Salford, UK * Atkinson, as a professor of creative writing and a published literary writer, uses her skills to create a powerful and memorable text. * Modern Language Review *

Not since For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Childrearing have I encountered a book that politicises familial violence and provides routes into and out of the traumatic and traumatising arrangements of forces, which are routinely part of family lives. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma is a feminist experiment and encounter, staging literary testimonies of trauma and relational violence at the dynamic intersection of affect and trauma studies, and subject, text and society. It is inventive, urgent, important and highly original. Meera Atkinson helps to define a new genre of writing that transfigures the lived experience of violence captured in literary testimonies into an urgent political category that captivates and allows the proliferation of new visibilities and intelligibilities. Lisa Blackman, Co-Head of Media and Communications Department, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK Breaking through the collective denial of the social effects of increased family and partner violence, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma develops close readings of literary texts that figure the 'cyclical haunting' of familial trauma. Atkinson's book makes a strong case for using the sensory intimacy of literature as a tool to overcome the communicative impasse of traumatic silences. It mobilizes a feminist perspective to explore the intersections of body studies and affect theory and makes a timely contribution to trauma studies and theory as well as literary studies. Gabriele Schwab, Chancellor's Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, USA

Author Information

Meera Atkinson is Lecturer in English Literature at New York University Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Traumata (2018) and co-editor, with Michael Richardson, of Traumatic Affect (2013). Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published in Salon.com, Best Australian Poems 2010, and Best Australian Stories 2007 among other publications.

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