LMH’s new Fellow and Tutor in Spanish, Dr Hannie Lawlor (2011, Modern Languages), has published a monograph with Oxford University Press (OUP) entitled: Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women’s Writing.
Drawing upon Dr Lawlor’s research interest in comparative approaches to women’s autobiographical practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women’s Writing offers new insight into what it means to write relational lives. Dr Lawlor seeks to broaden the parameters of existing discussions in terms of geography as well as genre. While French women’s writing has historically dominated discussions of autobiography, Dr Lawlor notes that Spanish women’s contributions have often been overlooked.
Making a case for the inclusion of a more diverse range of voices, Dr Lawlor’s monograph seeks to challenge long-standing critical assumptions in autobiography studies and trauma theory about how writers can and should represent the multiple perspectives that are at the heart of intergenerational stories. In exploring the narrative solutions that these texts propose in response to the ethical questions they navigate, Relational Responses shows that writing relational lives rests on far more than the mere recounting of a shared history. ‘Relating’ in these texts, it proposes, is an act embedded in the telling of the story. It is a mode of testifying together to traumatic experience, one that reveals a powerful preoccupation in contemporary women’s life-writing practice with making space for the many voices and versions that otherwise go unheard.
You can read the first chapter of Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women’s Writing for free on the OUP website until 31 October 2024.
