AustLit

'Trauma presents any writer with difficulties. Trauma lays outside the realm of representation, by definition something that cannot be expressed and that lies beyond ordinary means of recollection and representation. This article examines the close relationship that exists between trauma and ghost fiction. It highlights the potential ghost fictions, as a form of writing about death, offer writers as translators of historical and social trauma. By reading ghost fiction in tandem with scholarship on trauma fiction and autobiographical trauma writing, the article demonstrates how ghost fiction both prefigures a narrative understanding of memory and history in trauma studies, dramatizes some of the processes and risks of first and second party engagement with trauma and offers a unique opportunity to approach, interrogate and alleviate trauma from the outside. In short, ghost fiction enables creative interventions in social and historical memory not by offering realist ‘precise data’, but by ‘speaking for the ones who did not return’.' (Publication abstract)