Introduction : unravelling the knot -- "The white hush between two sentences" : the traumatic ambivalence of whiteness in Wide Sargasso Sea -- Keeping history safe -- "Caught between ghosts of whiteness" : the other side of the story -- Lucy : Jamaica Kincaid's postcolonial echo -- The search for a voice -- "The sea is history" -- "Knots of death" : Toni Morrison's Sula -- Ambivalent maternal inheritances -- The "gift for metaphor" -- Conclusion : a meditation on silence
Summary
"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."--BOOK JACKET