Both in terms of the literary materials analyzed and owing to its thoughtful, critical interdisciplinary approach, Christa Schönfelder's Wounds and Words makes a valuable contribution to the study of literary representations of trauma. The book stages an experiment of juxtaposing three Romantic narratives of “wounded minds” with three narratives by our contemporary women writers, also taking into account other works by their authors.
The Romantic works focused on are Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1798), William Godwin's Mandeville (1817), and their daughter Mary Shelley's Mathilda (1820, first published in 1959). In tune with the family relationship between these three writers, the main focus of the book is on trauma within the family, though the dysfunctionality of families represented in the novels is associated with political concerns and rooted in social realities or, in the case of Mandeville, in traumatic historical events. The same is true of...
