Whiteness and Trauma: The Mother-daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison

This book is a work of intellectual maturity and ethical integrity. Focused thematically on the 'mother-daughter knot' that structures the fiction of Morrison, Rhys and Kincaid, this study transforms the literary critical enterprise into one of relevance to contemporary cultural and feminist studies. Engaging both close reading practices and dense contextualisation, Burrows examines literary texts with a combination of broad scholarship and clarity. She employs theoretical resources principally from the fields of whiteness and trauma studies, and argues for the centrality of racial oppression and resistance in the shaping of narrative form and style. Her arguments for the metaphorical dimensions of racial trauma are original and contribute to a more general concern of renovating feminist literary criticism through a conscientious attentiveness to matters of race.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction: Unravelling the Knot 'The White Hush Between Two Sentences': The Traumatic Ambivalence of Whiteness in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea Keeping History Safe 'Caught Between Ghosts of Whiteness': The Other Side of the Story Lucy: Jamaica Kincaid's Postcolonial Echo The Search for a Voice 'The Sea Is History' 'Knots of Death': Toni Morrison's Sula Ambivalent Maternal Inheritances The 'Gift for Metaphor' A Meditation on Silence Bibliography Index

About the Author :
VICTORIA BURROWS is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia. She is currently working on a monograph on whiteness and shame in colonial and postcolonial literature of the family.

Review :
'[This] is a first rate literary study. By using metaphor as the instrument through which it seeks to come to terms with the vexed social and cultural issues it considers, it gives primacy to the distinctive work that literature performs...original and incisive.' - Professor Cheryl A. Wall, Department of English, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey 'This study presents a critical argument of the highest importance and offers a timely and intelligently argued intervention into feminist and trauma theory.' - Professor Linda Anderson, Department of English, Literature and Linguistic Studies, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne