Contemporary American Trauma Narratives

Alan Gibbs is a Lecturer in American Literature at University College Cork, Ireland. He is the author of Contemporary American Trauma Narratives (2014), which won the 2015 Irish Association for American Studies Peggy O'Brien Book Prize, and several articles on both trauma and naturalism in contemporary American culture.

• Introduction; Part 1. Traumatic Forms; 1. 'Classical' American Trauma Narratives; 2. Traumatic Metafiction and the Inscribed Narrator; Part 2: Traumatic Themes; 3. 9/11 and the Postmodernists' Response; 4. The Iraq Wars: Testimony, Perpetrators and Adaptation; 5. The Bush Administration and Counterfactual Histories; Conclusion.

Gibbs drives a cart and horses through the conventional critical orthodoxies of trauma theory, demonstrating the decisive challenge offered by contemporary American writers. Brimming with fresh insights, rigorously argued and covering a wide range of contemporary narratives, the book sets a new agenda for the study of trauma and literature.