Maria Holmgren Troy

Making Home : Orphanhood, kinship, and cultural memory in contemporary American novels

Introduction 1. Orphans and American literature: Texts, intertexts, and contexts 2. From captivity to kinship: Indian orphans and sovereignty 3. Literary kinships: Euro-American orphans, gender, genre, and cultural memory 4. Family matters: Euro-American orphans, the bildungsroman, and kinship building 5. At home in the world?: Orphans learn and remember in African American novels A Coda Bibliography Index

Predator and Prey

The temporal convergence between the social and cultural preoccupation with child sexual abuse, with the pedophile as the ultimate predator, and the appearance of the child vampire as a central cha ...

“The Unknown Soldier.” Film as a Founding Trauma and National Monument (John Sundholm) 111

Collective Traumas is about the traumatic European history of the 20th century - war, genocide, dictatorship, ethnic cleansing - and how individuals, communities and nations have dealt with their dark past through remembrance, historiography and legal settlements. Memories, and especially collective memories, serve as foundations for national identities and are politically charged. Regardless whether memory is used to support or to challenge established ideologies, it is inevitably subject to political tensions. Consequently, memory, history and amnesia tend to be used and abused for different political and ideological purposes. From the perspectives of historical, literary and visual studies the essays focus on how the experiences of war and profound conflict have been represented and remembered in different national cultures and communities. This volume is a vital contribution to memory studies and trauma theory. Collective Traumas is a result of the multi-disciplinary research project on Memory Culture that was initiated in 2002 at Karlstad University, Sweden.