Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift

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This book offers a critical reading of the novels of Graham Swift in light of recent developments in literary theory and criticism. It shows how the novels elaborate an ethics of alterity by means of a detailed study of one of Swift’s most persistent and fascinating – yet all too often ignored – concerns: the traumatic experience of reality. … Swift’s texts evoke the cultural pathologies of a nation (post-war Britain) and an era (modernity) through the narratives of individual characters who are struggling to come to terms with a traumatic personal and collective past. This study charts the entire trajectory of Swift’s engagement with the perils, pitfalls and possibilities of navigating a post-traumatic condition, proceeding from an emphasis on denial in his early work, through an intense preoccupation with the demands of trauma in the “middle-period” novels (including Waterland), to a seemingly liberating insistence on regeneration and renewal in Last Orders and The Light of Day. … By providing a wide-ranging and in-depth analysis of Swift’s novels against the background of the “ethical turn” in literary studies and the emergence of trauma theory, this book extends and enriches our understanding of what is arguably one of the most significant literary oeuvres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.