This volume addresses the construction and artistic representation of traumatic memories in the contemporary Western world from a variety of inter- and trans-disciplinarity critical approaches and perspectives, ranging from the cultural, political, historical, and ideological to the ethical and aesthetic, and distinguishing between individual, collective, and cultural traumas. The chapters introduce complementary concepts from diverse thinkers including Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Abraham and Torok, and Joyce Carol Oates; they also draw from fields of study such as Memory Studies, Theory of Affects, Narrative and Genre Theory, and Cultural Studies. Traumatic Memory and the Political, Economic, and Transhistorical Functions of Literature addresses trauma as a culturally embedded phenomenon and deconstructs the idea of trauma as universal, transhistorical, and abstract.

This volume explores the multifarious representational strategies used by contemporary writers to textualise memory and its friction areas through literary practices. By focusing on contemporary narratives in English from 1990 to the present, the essays in the collection delve into both the treatment of memory in literature and the view of literature as a medium of memory, paying special attention to major controversies attending the representation and (re)construction of individual, cultural and collective memories in the literary narratives published during the last few decades. By analysing texts written by authors of such diverse origins as Great Britain, South-Korea, the USA, Cuba, Australia, India, as well as Native-American Indian and African-American writers, the contributors to the collection analyse a good range of memory frictions —in connection with melancholic mourning, immigration, diaspora, genocide, perpetrator guilt, dialogic witnessing, memorialisation practices, inherited traumatic memories, sexual abuse, prostitution, etc.— through the recourse to various disciplines —such as psychoanalysis, ethics, (bio)politics, space theories, postcolonial studies, narratology, gender studies—, resulting in a book that is expected to make a ground-breaking contribution to a field whose possibilities have yet to be fully explored.

The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture delves into the complex problems involved in all attempts to survive. The essays analyze survival in contemporary prose narratives, short stories, poems, dramas, and theoretical texts, but also in films and other modes of cultural practices. Addressing diverse topics such as memory and forgetting in Holocaust narratives, stories of refugees and asylum seekers, and representations of war, the ethical implications involved in survival in texts and media are brought into a transnational critical discussion. The volume will be of potential interest to a wide range of critics working on ethical issues, the body, and the politics of art and literature.

The working hypothesis of the book is that, since the 1990s, an increasing number of Anglophone fictions are responding to the new ethical and political demands arising out of the facts of war, exclusion, climate change, contagion, posthumanism and other central issues of our post-trauma age by adapting the conventions of traditional forms of expressing grievability, such as elegy, testimony or (pseudo-)autobiography. Situating themselves in the wake of Judith Butler’s work on (un-)grievablability, the essays collected in this volume seek to cast new light on these issues by delving into the socio-cultural constructions of grievability and other types of vulnerabilities, invisibilities and inaudibilities linked with the neglect and/or abuse of non-normative individuals and submerged groups that have been framed as disposable, exploitable and/or unmournable by such determinant factors as sex, gender, ethnic origin, health, etc., thereby refining and displacing the category of subalternity associated with the poetics of postmodernism.

Trauma Informed Placemaking offers an introduction to understanding trauma and healing in place. It offers insights that researchers and practitioners can apply to their place-based practice, learning from a global cohort of place leaders and communities. The book introduces the ethos and application of the trauma-informed approach to working in place, with references to historical and contemporary trauma, including trauma caused by placemakers. It introduces the potential of place and of place practitioners to heal. Offering 20 original frameworks, toolkits and learning exercises across 33 first- and third-person chapters, multi-disciplinary insights are presented throughout. These are organised into four sections that lead the reader to an awareness of how trauma and healing operate in place. The book offers a first gathering of the current praxis in the field – how we can move from trauma in place to healing in place – and concludes with calls to action for the trauma-informed placemaking approach to be adopted. This book will be essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners interested in people and places, from artists and architects, policy makers and planners, community development workers and organisations, placemakers, to local and national governments. It will appeal to the disciplines of human geography, sociology, politics, cultural studies, psychology and to placemakers, planners and policymakers and those working in community development.

Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English offers a constructive dialogue on the concept of the transmodern, focusing on the works by very different contemporary authors from all over the world, such as: Chimanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood, Sebastian Barry, A. S. Byatt, Tabish Khair, David Mitchell, Alice Munroe, Harry Parker, Caryl Phillips, Richard Rodriguez, Alan Spence, Tim Winton and Kenneth White. The volume offers a thorough questioning of the concept of the transmodern, as well as an informed insight into the future formal and thematic development of literatures in English.

Transcending the Postmodern: The Singular Response of Literature to the Transmodern Paradigm gathers an introduction and ten chapters concerned with the issue of Transmodernity as addressed by and presented in contemporary novels hailing from various parts of the English-speaking world. Building on the theories of Transmodernity propounded by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda, Enrique Dussel, Marc Luyckx Ghisi and Irena Ateljevic, inter alia, it investigates the links between Transmodernity and such categories as Postmodernity, Postcolonialism and Transculturalism with a view to help define a new current in contemporary literary production. The chapters either follow the main theoretical drives of the transmodern paradigm or problematise them. In so doing, they branch out towards various issues that have come to inspire contemporary novelists, among which: the presence of the past, the ascendance of new technologies, multiculturalism, terrorism, and also vulnerability, interdependence, solidarity and ecology in a globalised context. In so doing, it interrogates the ethics, aesthetics and politics of the contemporary novel in English.