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Laurie Vickroy's Reading Trauma Narratives focuses on literary works that bring out the connections between individual trauma and systems of social oppression. Vickroy shows how reading fiction by Margaret Atwood, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Chuck Palahniuk, and Jeanette Winterson can bring readers to see the connections between individual trauma and broader cultural pathologies, especially those caused by the power relations inherent to class, gender, sexuality, and race. Her study makes a major contribution to contemporary approaches to trauma that broaden the concept of trauma from the personal to the collective and from the idea of a single overwhelming event to the chronic trauma experienced by marginalized groups and by those subject to domestic abuse. Taking her theoretical frame from the likes of Kai Erikson, Laura Brown, and Maria Root, Vickroy extends the definition of trauma to include the kind of chronic traumatic stress produced by persistent denigration and humiliation. For Vickroy, as for these theorists and novelists, trauma is an indicator of social injustice.
The strength of the study lies in its perceptiveness about characters. Vickroy's thorough understanding of trauma and the survival strategies engendered by it enables her to illuminate the characters of Atwood, Morrison, Faulkner, Winterson, and Palahniuk from a different angle than we are accustomed. This perspective enables her to probe the complicated depths of perpetrators of even the most heinous crimes, like the patriarchal figures in Morrison's Paradise, who kill five unarmed, innocent women. Vickroy's analysis of the effects of past trauma on these characters suggests a way for readers of Morrison, and of the other authors she discusses, to make more nuanced ethical judgments by understanding characters' destructive acts: not as isolated events, but as actions...