The Gothic in Contemporary British Trauma Fiction [Hardcover]

This book examines the intersection of trauma and the Gothic in six contemporary British novels: Martin Amiss London Fields, Margaret Drabbles The Gates of Ivory, Ian McEwans Atonement, Pat Barkers Regeneration and Double Vision, and Kazuo Ishiguros 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 individuals 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.

Ashlee Joyce is Instructor of English and writing at the University of New Brunswicks Fredericton and Saint John campuses, Canada. Her previous publications include Gothic Misdirections: Troubling the Trauma Fiction Paradigm in Pat Barkers Double Vision (2019) and The Nuclear Anxiety ol“6