Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women's Writing

Hannie Lawlor is Associate Professor in Modern Spanish Literature and Film at Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville College, University of Oxford. Previously, she was Lecturer in Spanish at University College Dublin, and she holds a PhD from Wolfson College, Oxford. Her comparative research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish women's prose and film and on twenty-first-century life narratives, and with Dr Alexandra Effe, she is co-editor of The Autofictional: Approaches, Affordances, Forms(Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

Hannie Lawlor... offers a significant and timely contribution ... Her monograph skillfully challenges established autobiographical frameworks while expanding the geographical and linguistic scope of the field. Meticulously researched and theoretically incisive, this study shows how contemporary French and Spanish women writers are reshaping our understanding of what it means to write relational lives...Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women's Writing succeeds brilliantly in its dual aims of challenging existing theoretical assumptions and proposing new frameworks for understanding contemporary life writing.

• Dialogues in Twenty-First-Century Life Writing Part One 1: Traumatic Legacies and Narrative Claims: Rewriting Relations in Colombe Schneck's La Réparation (2012) and Juana Salabert's Velódromo de Invierno(2001) 1.1: The Matter of Inheritance 1.2: Relations, Repairs and Replacement in La Réparation 1.3: Missing Fathers and Illegitimate Authors: Velódromo de Invierno Displaced Subjects and Ventriloquised Voices: Intergenerational Relations and The Ethics of Representation in Dulce Chacón's La voz dormida (2002) and Lydie Salvayre's Pas pleurer (2014) 69 2.1: Loudspeakers and Mouthpieces: Contrasting Approaches to Telling the Other's Tale 2.2: Magnified Stories, Minimised Voices: La voz dormida 2.3: Pas pleurer: Speaking in (M)other Tongues 2.4: Reciprocal Relations and the Ethics of Postmemory Part Two Legacy, Lineage and lignes de fuite: Intergenerational Transmission in Nicole Lapierre's Sauve qui peut la vie (2015) and Gabriela Ybarra's El comensal (2015) 3.1: (Dis)Connecting Traumatic Histories 3.2: Lines of Flight in Sauve qui peut la vie 3.3: Narrative Loops and Impending Returns in El comensal 3.4: Images of Intergenerational Transmission Burials, Exhumations, and Textual Tombs: Addressing the Other in Milena Busquets's También esto pasará (2015) and Sophie Daull's Camille, mon envolée (2015) 4.1: The Function of Funerals 4.2: Scattered Ashes in También esto pasará 4.3: Constructing a Cenotaph: Camille, mon envolée 4.4: Burial Shrouds in La Suture (2016) 4.5: Ethical Reburials and Alternative Conversations Part Three Clashing Family Stories and Inconceivable Conversations: Christine Angot's Un amour impossible (2015) and Cristina Fallarás's Honrarás a tu padre y a tu madre (2018) 5.1: Misalliance, Transmission and Incestuous Desire 5.2: Illusory Exchanges in Un amour impossible 5.3: Dialogues with the Dead: Honrarás a tu padre y a tu madre 5.4: Contaminating Conversations Writing Relational Lives Bibliography