Shock, memory and the unconscious in Victorian fiction /

Though scholars in a number of disciplines have explored the late-modern concept of trauma, Matus's analysis of the ways in which Victorian authors articulated trauma as an emerging cultural formation makes a unique and significant contribution to literary studies. Individual chapters focus on novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others, but one of the book's more valuable contributions is its linking of new Victorian technologies--from railway and steamship travel, to new forms of communication, to emerging scientific theories--with the ways in which Victorian authors shaped the concept of trauma, particularly the creation of the traumatized subject. Also author of Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (CH, Dec'95, 33-2293) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (CH, Nov'07, 45-1315), Matus (Univ. of Toronto) grounds her study in both early Victorian theories of psychology and contemporary literary and cultural theory. The book's concepts may prove challenging for some undergraduates, but Matus's clear prose style helps to make this book a significant and welcome contribution to the literature. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. R. D. Morrison Morehead State University