WELCOME

Welcome to the official blog of the "Trauma and `Herstory´, with special emphasis on the work of Eva Figes" conference.
This is a site for all those who participated in one way or another in this wonderful experience and for those who are interested in smiliar research topics.
Enjoy the blog and participate actively in it!
With best wishes from the organisers,
Silvia and Sonya

Thursday 9 May 2013

TRAUMA NARRATIVES AND HERSTORY PUBLISHED

Finally, after all the hard work, we can happily announce that the book Trauma Narratives and Herstory has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan (ISBN 9781137268341)

In this post, we include some information about the contents of the book and a link to the official page of Palgrave for you to disseminate the publication as much as you can. In the next days, we will also upload some flyers that you may use to make this great collection of essays be known to other scholars and experts in the field.

We would really like to thank all the contributors for their excellent work and patience during the process, it has been an honour for us to work with you and we hope to collaborate with you in other future projects.
Also, to the potential readers of the book, we hope you learn a lot with all the essays and that you find the collection very interesting and inspiring:

DESCRIPTION
This book draws together international scholars to examine the representation of female trauma and women's version of history in contemporary literature and culture. Focusing on texts by or about women, the book explores the variety of representational strategies used to depict female traumatic experiences, and articulates the complex relation between trauma, gender and signification. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to trauma, the authors analyse a range of genres including fictional texts, autobiography, comics and film. Writers discussed include: Alice Walker, Eva Figes, Cristina García, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Dorothy Allison, Diane Noomin and Maxine Hong Kingston, among others. Demonstrating a rich plurality of perspectives, the volume sheds light on the power of literature and art to enable minority subjects to come to terms with loss and trauma.

CONTENTS
Introduction: Trauma Narratives and Herstory; Sonya Andermahr and Silvia Pellicer-Ortín

PART I: TRAUMA AS DISLOCATION IN FEMALE NARRATIVES
1. 'Compulsively readable and deeply moving': Women's Middlebrow Trauma Fiction; Sonya Andermahr
2. Dislocations and Traumas in Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban and Loida Martiza Pérez's Geographies of Home; Simone A. Aguiar
3. Trauma, Female Identity and the Trope of Splitness in Figes, Lessing, Tennant and Weldon; Olga Glebova
4. Of Grandmothers and Bad Wolves: Fairy Tale, Myth and Trauma in Eva Figes' Tales of Innocence and Experience; Julia Tofantšuk

PART II: TRAUMA NARRATIVES AND FEMALE SURVIVAL STRATEGIES
5. Trauma and Survival in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, or the power of alternative stories; Mélanie Grué
6. Overcoming Double Victimization in Alice Walker's The Color Purple, or the self-healing power of writing 'Herstory'; Valérie Croisille
7. 'Locking the Door': Self-Deception, Silence and Survival in Alice Munro's 'Vandals'; Corinne Bigot

PART III: THE REWRITING OF HISTORY IN TRAUMA HERSTORIES
8. 'Stories never told': Canonicity, History and 'Herstory' in Dan Jacobson's Her Story and The God-Fearer; David Brauner
9. Herstory Unwritten: Trauma, Memory, Identity and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved; Emma Domínguez Rué
10. Depathologising Racial Melancholia in Intergenerational Herstories; Hannah Ho Ming Yit

PART IV: TRAUMA AND HERSTORY IN VISUAL CULTURES
11. Psychic resilience in the fragile images of A Petal: a post-Jungian perspective on retraumatisation; Emily Ashman
12. Wit(h)nessing Trauma in Keisuke Kinoshita's Twenty-Four Eyes; Claudia Lindner Leporda
13. Cartoon Tears: Diane Noomin's Baby Talk: A Tale of Four Miscarriages; Sarah Lightman

AUTHORS


 Sonya Andermahr is Reader in English at the University of Northampton, UK. She has written widely on contemporary British and American women's writing. Her publications include Jeanette Winterson (2009), Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide (2007) and, with Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz, A Glossary of Feminist Theory (2000). Her current research interest lies in female trauma narratives with a particular focus on narratives of maternal loss in contemporary women's writing. She has also co-edited (with Lawrence Phillips) Angela Carter: New Critical Readings (2012).

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín is Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology and the Faculty of Education, University of Zaragoza. Silvia wrote her PhD thesis on the work of Eva Figes as a Research Fellow at the University of Zaragoza and is currently a member of its ‘consolidated’ research team, ‘Contemporary Narrative in English’. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Universities of Cambridge and Reading and has delivered many papers related to her main fields of research, Trauma and Holocaust Studies, British-Jewish writers, autobiography and feminism. She is the author of several articles dealing with these issues, and she is working on the co-edition, with Dr. Sonya Andermahr, of a special issue of the journal Critical Engagements on the work of the writer Eva Figes (2012).


 Where to buy it?

All the best,
Sonya and Silvia