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“Everything You Ever Dreamed”: Post-9/11 Trauma and Fantasy in Ali Smith’s The Accidental
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 58, Number 3, Fall 2012
- pp. 637-654
- 10.1353/mfs.2012.0052
- Article
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Noting a recent critical trend to read contemporary fiction in terms of trauma theory, this article explores Ali Smith’s The Accidental both as a negotiation and critique of this fashion. Recognizing trauma’s centrality in the novel in terms of personal guilt and public catastrophe in relation to an implicit Iraq War background, I argue that the novel reaffirms trauma theory’s importance, even as it criticizes post-9/11 appropriations of traumatic sentiment. By undermining romantic and patriarchal readings of trauma as the function of a state-of-alert, the novel satirizes salient post-9/11 discourses and reaffirms its final unease with trauma culture.