MACMILLAN The Gothic in Contemporary British Trauma Fiction

This book examines the intersection of trauma and the Gothic in six contemporary British novels: Martin Amis’s London Fields, Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Double Vision, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. In these works, the Gothic functions both as an expression of societal violence at the turn of the twenty-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. Review “The scholarship here is well done and should stand the test of time extremely well, coming to be an integral part of the work already in existence on these novels as well as making a valuable contribution to both the Gothic and Trauma studies. It will be an invaluable resource for students, academics and researchers involved in both fields.” (Dr. Jonathan Greenaway, co-editor of Horror and Religion: New Literary Approaches to Theology, Race and Sexuality (2019) and founding editor of the Dark Arts Journal) From the Back Cover This book examines the intersection of trauma and the Gothic in six contemporary British novels: Martin Amis’s London Fields, Margaret Drabble’s The Gates of Ivory, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Pat Barker’s Regeneration and Double Vision, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. In these works, the Gothic functions both as an expression of societal violence at the turn of the twenty-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. About the Author Ashlee Joyce is Instructor of English and writing at the University of New Brunswick’s Fredericton and Saint John campuses, Canada. Her previous publications include “Gothic Misdirections: Troubling the Trauma Fiction Paradigm in Pat Barker’s Double Vision” (2019) and “The Nuclear Anxiety of Twin Peaks: The Return” (2019).