Women Writing Girlhood Trauma in Aotearoa New Zealand Literature (1975-2025)

Marine Berthiot investigates how trauma-reading methodologies devised in Aotearoa, New Zealand shed light on the trauma narratives of fictional and non-fictional girls growing up in the settler colony. Assessing the connection between trauma-telling, gender, and genres in women’s writing, Berthiot sheds light on a country that is too often absent from trauma studies, postcolonial literary studies, and feminist philosophy, despite its status as a pioneering nation in terms of women's rights. This book highlights the intergenerational ripples of cultural and environmental traumas on girls’ development, and examines depictions of interpersonal, vicarious, and transgenerational forms of trauma. By examining a variety of literary genres (life writing, short storytelling, verbal and visual poetry, fictional diaries and epistolary novels, as well as the female Bildungsromane) the author charts how genre is both shaped and is shaped by trauma-telling practices and how readers can develop a culturally sensitive approach to trauma narratives to avoid retraumatizing survivors.