Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: the psyche in pain
- 1 Historicizing trauma
- 2 Dream and trance: Gaskell's North and South as a “condition-of-consciousness” novel
- 3 Memory and aftermath: from Dickens's “The Signalman” to The Mystery of Edwin Drood
- 4 Overwhelming emotion and psychic shock in George Eliot's The Lifted Veil and Daniel Deronda
- 5 Dissociation and multiple selves: memory, Myers and Stevenson's “shilling shocker”
- Afterword on afterwards
- Notes
- Selected bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
1 - Historicizing trauma
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: the psyche in pain
- 1 Historicizing trauma
- 2 Dream and trance: Gaskell's North and South as a “condition-of-consciousness” novel
- 3 Memory and aftermath: from Dickens's “The Signalman” to The Mystery of Edwin Drood
- 4 Overwhelming emotion and psychic shock in George Eliot's The Lifted Veil and Daniel Deronda
- 5 Dissociation and multiple selves: memory, Myers and Stevenson's “shilling shocker”
- Afterword on afterwards
- Notes
- Selected bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
CONTEMPORARY TRAUMA THEORY
In the last few decades, trauma theory has achieved great saliency in an array of disciplines. It has been widely applied in studies of twentieth-century forms of testimony and the capacity of literature to bear witness to traumatic experience, not just individual but generational and national. From the uniquely personal repercussions of childhood abuse to the wide-scale reverberations of colonial rupture, the concept of trauma has come to cover a wide range of suffering. E. Ann Kaplan remarks that “it is partly because of accumulated twentieth-century traumatic events that psychologists, sociologists, and humanists are investigating trauma.” Although no one could claim that the twentieth century has the monopoly on horrific experience, trauma theory, it has been suggested, emerged as a response to “modernity.” This view arises in large measure from the influential work of Walter Benjamin, which identified modernity with a rupture in experience and a break in consciousness. But, as Benjamin himself understood, the material conditions and technologies we associate with modernity began well before the twentieth century. Large-scale cataclysmic accidents, experiences of near death and miraculous survival were certainly part of the Victorian industrialized world. How did Victorians understand the effect on consciousness and memory of events and experiences that “went beyond the range of the normal” – events so overwhelming and inassimilable that the ordinary processes of registration and representation were suspended or superseded? And what proposed architecture of mind would support a theory of ruptured or suspended registration?
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- Information
- Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction , pp. 20 - 60Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009