Whiteness and Trauma : The Mother-Daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison

This original and incisive study of the fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison uses cutting edge cultural and literary theory to examine the 'knotted' mother-daughter relations that form the thematic basis of the texts examined.

Whiteness and Trauma, now in paperback for the first time and with a new preface, focuses thematically on the ''mother-daughter knot'' that structures the fiction of Morrison, Rhys and Kincaid. This study transforms the literary critical enterprise into one of relevance to contemporary cultural and feminist studies. Engaging both close reading practices and dense contextualisation, Burrows examines literary texts with a combination of broad scholarship and clarity. She employs theoretical resources principally from the fields of whiteness and trauma studies, and argues for the centrality of racial oppression and resistance in the shaping of narrative form and style. Her arguments for the metaphorical dimensions of racial trauma are original and contribute to a more general concern of renovating feminist literary criticism through a conscientious attentiveness to matters of race.