Herrero, M. Dolores and Sonia Baelo Allué (eds.). Between the Urge to Know and
the Need to Deny: Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British and American Literature.
Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011. ISBN: 9783825358846.
Trauma and ethics are two terms inextricably linked. This book is concerned with trauma and
its representations in contemporary British and American literature within the wider context
of the ethics of writing, reading, and interpreting trauma and trauma narratives. More
particularly, it analyses the connections between trauma, gender, identity, and genre issues.
The contributors to this volume study the various modes of writing, genres, and generic
conventions which have been used and/or subverted to represent traumas of different kinds in
a selection of contemporary British and American novels. This collection consequently deals
with one of the most important concerns of contemporary academic criticism, namely, the
ethical implications of the representation of trauma. Moreover, gender issues are also given
special attention, since many contemporary novels in English focus on the articulation of
traumas resulting from the inequalities and abuses connected with identity and gender.