Literary Aesthetics of Trauma Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson [Hardcover]

Literary Aesthetics of Trauma: Virginia Woolf and Jeanette Winterson investigates a fundamental shift, from the 1920s to the present day, in the way that trauma is aesthetically expressed. Modernism's emphasis on impersonality and narrative abstraction has been replaced by the contemporary trauma memoir and an ethical imperative to bear witness.Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Trauma, Psychoanalysis, Literary Form 2. Writing the Body: Trauma, Woolf, Winterson 3. Symbolization, Thinking and Working-Through: British Object Relations Theory 4. 'The Most Difficult Abstract Piece of Writing': 'Time Passes' as Container 5. 'Ideas of Feeling': Symbolic Transformation in Modernist Formalist Aesthetics 6. Woolf's Embodied Cognitive Aesthetics: The Waves 7. From Form to Feeling: Trauma and Affective Excess in Art and Lies 8. 'The Story of My Life': Winterson's Adoption, Art and Autobiography 9. Coda Notes References Index

'...this is a book of prodigious scholarship with a carefully considered, contemporary message.' - Dianne M. Hunter, Woolf Studies Annual

Reina van der Wiel is Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK and has also taught English Literature at Birkbeck and Middlesex University. She has published work in Women: A Cultural Review and Scenes of Intimacy: Writing, Reading and Theorizing Contemporary Literature, edited by Jennifer Cooke.