Deceptive fictions : narrating trauma and violence in contemporary writing / by Ulrike Tancke.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 155-166) and index.

Trauma and violence in contemporary fiction : theorising narrative deception and narrative complicity -- Collective trauma as narrative red herring : Ian McEwan's Saturday -- The fiction and purpose of turning points : Ali Smith's The Accidental -- Violence and misleading narratives : Pat Barker's Border Crossing -- Storytelling and/or biology : Jon McGregor's So many ways to begin -- Materiality and narrative manipulation : Anne Enright's The Gathering.

Print version record.

Deceptive Fictions: Narrating Trauma and Violence in Contemporary Writing explores the widespread narrative concern with trauma and violence, and their interactions with identity, meaning, ethics, history, memory and various other related issues in a selection of novels by prolific contemporary British and Irish writers. Interrogating the strategic functions of trauma and violence, the book argues that these texts can be read as counter-narratives to, or a backlash against, still-prevalent critical paradigms informed by poststructuralist and postmodern thought. Trauma and violence are invoked as narrative tools to communicate the centrality of the body and of biological and material constraints on human actions. This emphasis on reality and the experiential ties in with the novels' consistent focus on the individual as an ethical agent and originator of meaning. In so doing, they signal a move in contemporary fiction towards a textual practice that can most fruitfully be approached along the lines of an individualistic, evolutionary, corporeal and experiential narratology, which self-consciously reflects on the manipulative potentials of narrative.

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