Writing the Survivor

Robin E. Field is Professor of English at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. She is co-editor of Transforming Diaspora: Communities beyond National Boundaries (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011) and has authored articles and book chapters on Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, Alice Walker, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Ayad Akhtar. Her research interests include gender, trauma, contemporary literature, and postcolonial studies. She is the Director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and teaching at King’s College and the Managing Editor of the journal South Asian Review.

• Introduction: Rethinking Rape in the American Cultural and Literary LandscapeChapter One: Rape Consciousness: From Activism to TextChapter Two: Breaking Silence, Telling Tales: Writing Rape in Novels of the 1970sChapter Three: “The Victim Demands Narrative”: Writing the Perspective of the Rape Victim-Survivor in the Long 1980sChapter 4: Tracing Trauma in Rape Fiction of the Long 1990sChapter 5: Writing the Male Rape Survivor: The Rape Novel in the Twenty-First Century

‘Scholars who study rape representation in any form of literature or media, regardless of whether or not it’s from the twentieth century, will benefit from Field’s keen and critical eye for the underpinnings of the way literary rape has been produced and consumed in various forms. Moving from women’s memoir to women’s movements in the early twentieth century to later twentieth-century fiction by women, to movements by male victims of rape, to men’s fiction, and to men’s memoirs, Field’s careful tracing of the rape novel’s development comes to a fulfilling conclusion.’ Michaela Tashjian, Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies