Main description:

This interdisciplinary study rereads father-daughter incest narratives of the last hundred years to argue for the importance of literature in representing not just circumscribed, singular traumatic events, as Cathy Caruth argued in the late nineties, but for giving voice to chronic and cumulative, or complex, traumatic experiences. Contributing to the work of the second-wave of trauma theory, this book responds in part to the psychological community, which failed to include complex PTSD in the DSM-5.

Contents:

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Wound and the Voiceless Chapter 1: "Flinching at the Word Father": Trauma Politics in Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night Chapter 2: "Naw You Ain't No Man": Ellison's Invisible Man and the Woman Question Revisited Chapter 3: Morrison Responds to the Psychological Community in The Bluest Eye Chapter 4: "White Trash" Trauma in Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina Chapter 5: The Failure of Bearing Witness: The Politics of Truth Telling and Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss: A Memoir Chapter 6: Convicting the Victim: Stacey Lannert's Redemption and the "Little-Known Psychological Problem" of Child-Abuse Parricide Conclusion: Trauma in the Twenty-First Century Bibliography Index About the Author