New Visibilities: Victimhood and Other Forms of Vulnerability in 21st-century Fiction (eds. Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega) addresses the relationship between trauma and ethics, and moves one step further to engage with vulnerability studies in their relation to literature and literary form. It consists of an introduction and of twelve articles written by specialists from various European countries and includes an interview with US novelist Jayne Anne Philips, conducted by her translator into French, Marc Amfreville, addressing her latest novel, Quiet Dell, through the victimhood-vulnerability prism. The corpus of primary sources on which the volume is based draws on various literary backgrounds in English, from Britain to India, through the USA. All contributions are original.

Literary trauma studies is a rapidly developing field which examines how literature deals with the personal and cultural aspects of trauma and engages with such historical and current phenomena as the Holocaust and other genocides, 9/11, climate catastrophe or the still unsettled legacy of colonialism. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma is a comprehensive guide to the history and theory of trauma studies, including key concepts, consideration of critical perspectives and discussion of future developments. It also explores different genres and media, such as poetry, life-writing, graphic narratives, photography and post-apocalyptic fiction, and analyses how literature engages with particular traumatic situations and events, such as the Holocaust, the Occupation of France, the Rwandan genocide, Hurricane Katrina and transgenerational nuclear trauma. Forty essays from top thinkers in the field demonstrate the range and vitality of trauma studies as it has been used to further the understanding of literature and other cultural forms across the world. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary and filmic representations of vulnerability depict embodied forms of vulnerability across languages, media, genres, countries, and traditions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The volume gathers 12 chapters penned by scholars from Japan, the USA, Canada, and Spain which look into the representation of vulnerability in human bodies and subjectivities. Not only is the array of genres covered in this volume significant— from narrative, drama, poetry, (auto)documentary, or film— in fiction and nonfiction, but also the varied cultural and linguistic coordinates of the literary and filmic texts scrutinized—from the USA, Canada, Spain, France, the Middle East, to Japan. Readers who decide to open the cover of this volume will benefit from becoming familiar with a relatively old topic— that of vulnerability— from a new perspective, so that they can consider the great potential of this critical concept anew.

Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary representations of vulnerability may problematize its visibilization from an ethical and aesthetic perspective. Recent technological and scientific developments have accentuated human vulnerability in many and different ways at a cross-national, and even cross-species level. Disability, technological, and ecological vulnerabilities are new foci of interest that add up to gender, precarity and trauma, among others, as forms of vulnerability in this volume. The literary visualization of these vulnerabilities might help raise social awareness of one’s own vulnerabilities as well as those of others so as to bring about global solidarity based on affinity and affect. However, the literary representation of forms of vulnerability might also deepen stigmatization phenomena and trivialize the spectacularization of vulnerability by blunting readers’ affective response towards those products that strive to hold their attention and interest in an information-saturated, global entertainment market.

Mediating Vulnerability examines vulnerability from a range of connected perspectives. It responds to the vulnerability of species, their extinction but also their transformation. This tension between extreme danger and creativity is played out in literary studies through the pressures the discipline brings to bear on its own categories, particularly those of genre. Extinction and preservation on the one hand, transformation, adaptation and (re)mediation on the other. These two poles inform our comparative and interdisciplinary project. The volume is situated within the particular intercultural and intermedial context of contemporary cultural representation. Vulnerability is explored as a site of potential destruction, human as well as animal, but also as a site of potential openness. This is the first book to bring vulnerability studies into dialogue with media and genre studies. It is organised in four sections: ‘Human/Animal’; Violence/Resistance’; ‘Image/Narrative’; and ‘Medium/Genre’. Each chapter considers the intersection of vulnerability and genre from a comparative perspective, bringing together a team of international contributors and editors. The book is in dialogue with the reflections of Judith Butler and others on vulnerability, and it questions categories of genre through an interdisciplinary engagement with different representational forms, including digital culture, graphic novels, video games, photography and TV series, in addition to novels and short stories. It offers new readings of high-profile contemporary authors of fiction including Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, as well as bringing lesser-known figures to the fore.

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.

The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction tracks the emergence of a new type of physically and/or spiritually wounded hero(ine) in contemporary fiction. Editors, Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteu bring together some of the top minds in the field to explore the paradoxical lives of these heroes that have embraced, rather than overcome, their suffering, alienation and marginalisation as a form of self-definition.