Trauma and Contemporary Crime Fiction

This book reflects on crime narratives as a site of trauma and explores crime trauma fiction as a space for addressing urgent social issues and offering social critique. Informed by both crime fiction scholarship and trauma studies, Trauma and Contemporary Crime Fiction demonstrates how traumatic experience can be depicted in ways that correlate with concerns and general tendencies in trauma studies and in contemporary society, including perpetrator trauma and pretrauma, inviting political awareness in readers. Examining both written and visual crime narratives from the Global North to the Global South, the authors argue that trauma complicates and renders time, agency, and guilt ambiguous and reinvents the genre by causing the boundaries to bleed between the traditional roles of detective, perpetrator, and victim within the crime genre and between the crime and trauma genres, thus contributing to the growing hybridisation of the crime genre.