“No Where Cool”: Narratives of Trauma in Selected Women Writings

The field of trauma studies in literary criticism gained significant attention in 1996 with the publication of Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Since then many authors have been fascinated with the exploration of trauma in their literary works. These ‘trauma narratives’ explores the theory of pain and its aftermath. Baker (2012) posits that a literary theory refers to a particular form of literary criticism in which specific academic, scientific, or philosophical approaches are followed in a systematic fashion while analysing literary texts. The wider implication is that every literary theory offers specific, logical methods to literary texts that impose a specific line of intellectual reasoning to it. Literary theorists often borrow systems of knowledge outside the domains of literary studies and use them as a lens to interpret and discover unique understandings of texts.