Mei-yu Tsai

Performing the Trauma of History: the War and the Politics of Memory in the Works of Sigmund Freud, D.h. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Malcolm Lowry Mei-yu Tsai

Although new historical scholarship on trauma has expressed great interest in exploring the role of metaphor and modernist figurative language in writing about trauma, there has so far been relatively little systematic scrutiny of the links between modernist aesthetics and the shocking and unresolved nature of traumatic history. This book, therefore, seeks to remark on a modernist vision of history as trauma shared by both Freud and modernist writers. Bringing a historical vision to modernism and reading modernist literature as a literature of trauma, this book aims to show that the mad and schizophrenic nature of modernist narrative has both aesthetic and historical justification. Such a reading helps add a historical dimension to modernist stylistic devices in which modernist writers employ a peculiar form of non-linearity and a circular textual referentiality to represent history through the symptomology of trauma. This book will be particularly useful to professionals in modern literature and trauma studies, or anyone else who is interested in reading literature against/with history.