Possessing the past : trauma, imagination, and memory in post-plantation Southern literature
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Possessing the past : trauma, imagination, and memory in post-plantation Southern literature
(Southern literary studies)
Louisiana State University Press, c2015
- : [cloth]
Available at 5 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-268) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Employing recent theories of memory from multiple areas of study, Possessing the Past illuminates the tangled relationships among trauma, fantasy, and the public sphere, and their impact on the ""South"" in imagination and in reality. Focusing on the roles that narrative and fantasy play in creating a sense of regional distinctiveness, Lisa Hinrichsen brings a wealth of critical scholarship to her consideration of memory and southern literature.
Hinrichsen's nuanced readings of a diverse group of southern authors, including William Faulkner, Roberto Fernandez, Erna Brodber, Monique Truong, and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, offer new ways of conceptualizing memory, place, and history. She unravels southern literature's critical confrontation with the region's history through complex systems of remembrance and erasure, and she traces how fantasy mediates trauma and adjudicates identity. Expansive in its psychoanalytical approach, her work explores issues of law, testimony, and social justice; the role of nostalgic fantasies of gentility at midcentury; the relationship between white empathy and social fantasy; the resemblance of regional patterns of disavowal to national ideologies of forgetting in Vietnam-era fiction; and the impact of contemporary multicultural literature on memory and community.
Possessing the Past broadens the theoretical framework used to conceptualize memory and trauma, while grounding traumatic testimony in the specifics of time and place amply offered by southern literature. It provides new readings of an array of southern writers and deepens our understanding of the continuing importance of history, memory, and fantasy in the literature of the U.S. South.
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