Full Description
This book examines the intersection of trauma and the Gothic in six contemporary British novels: Martin Amis's London Fields, Margaret Drabble's The Gates of Ivory, Ian McEwan's Atonement, Pat Barker's Regeneration and Double Vision, and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. In these works, the Gothic functions both as an expression of societal violence at the turn of the twenty-first century and as a response to the related crisis of representation brought about by the contemporary individual's highly mediated and spectatorial relationship to this violence. By locating these six novels within the Gothic tradition, this work argues that each text, to borrow a term from Jacques Derrida, "participates" in the Gothic in ways that both uphold the paradigm of "unspeakability" that has come to dominate much trauma fiction, as well as push its boundaries to complicate how we think of the ethical relationship between witnessing and writing trauma.
Contents
Introduction: The Resurgence of the Gothic in Contemporary British Trauma Fiction.- Beyond the Event Horizon: Witnessing the Nuclear Sublime in Martin Amis's London Fields.- Gothic Collisions: Regarding Trauma in Margaret Drabble's The Gates of Ivory.- Gothic Misdirections: Troubling the Trauma Fiction Paradigm in Pat Barker's Double Vision.- Witness or Spectator?: Gothic Interrogations of the Reader-Witness in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.- Conclusion.
