It further explores the nature and extent of ‘trauma culture’ from 1980 to the present, drawing upon a range of cultural practices from literature, memoirs and confessional journalism through to photography and film.

The Trauma Question outlines the origins of the concept of trauma across psychiatric, legal and cultural-political sources from the 1860s to the coining of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in 1980. In this book, Roger Luckhurst both introduces and advances the fields of cultural memory and trauma studies, tracing the ways in which ideas of trauma have become a major element in contemporary Western conceptions of the self. Ultimately, this paper argues that a recurrent question posed in Smith’s novel – “Imagine or afraid?” – encapsulates the essential choice with which humanity is repeatedly faced: as our old ways collapse around us, we can either cling to them at our peril, or dare to imagine an alternative future. Finally, it contemplates the Derridean concept of the spectre as that which must be acknowledged to effect change within these novels, examining their characters’ comparative levels of willingness to do so in relation to the extent to which their lives are either corroded or transformed. It then considers Fred Botting’s characterisation of the Gothic as an evocation of nightmare, contrasting the aptness of this reading to Waters’ morbid novel with The Accidental, which instead focuses, more optimistically, on awakenings.

It begins by meditating on representations of conservatism as intrinsically spectral in its attempt to perpetually relive the dead or dying ways of the past in the present. This paper explores this relationship through an examination of two novels, Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (2009) and Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2006), both of which involve spectral intrusions into bourgeois homes during periods of social and economic upheaval. For Jerrold Hogle, Baudrillard’s simulacrum essentially characterises the majority of Gothic narratives. For Jean Baudrillard, the age of late capitalism is characterised by an endemic loss of meaning, as “serial repetition” produces a cultural state in which signifiers refer not to actual objects, but to previous signifiers, and thus become increasingly emptied of their original denotation.

The Accidental by Ali Smith