The Gothic In Contemporary British Trauma Fiction by Ashlee Joyce, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

This book examines the intersection of trauma and the Gothic in six contemporary British novels: Martin Amis'sLondon Fields, Margaret Drabble'sThe Gates of Ivory, Ian McEwan'sAtonement, Pat Barker'sRegenerationandDouble Vision, and Kazuo Ishiguro'sNever Let Me Go. In these works, the Gothic functions both as an expression of societal violence at the turn of thetwenty-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. | The Gothic In Contemporary British Trauma Fiction by Ashlee Joyce, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters