Output details

Trauma, Postmodernism and the Aftermath of World War II

Roughly half of one of this book's five chapters draws on material from an output published prior to 1 January 2008, which was returned to RAE 2008: 'Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwan's Atonement', Cultural Politics 3.1 (2007), 51-70. This material was expanded and synthesised into the wider arguments of the book.

This book develops an extensive and complex thesis that resituates British and American postmodernist fiction in relation to the Second World War and underlies the request for double-weighting. Four years’ research and writing involved a re-thinking of prevailing understandings of the temporal and historical dynamics of postmodernism. The book’s wide-ranging argument draws on sustained and detailed engagement with the voluminous theoretical literature on both postmodernism and psychological trauma. Its readings of canonical texts by Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, and Ian McEwan arise from extensive analysis of the very large body of critical writing devoted to these authors.