Narrating Trauma: Victorian Novels and Modern Stress Disorders, by Gretchen Braun Available to Purchase

In The Way of the World (1987), Franco Moretti identifies the bildungsroman as “the ‘symbolic form’ of modernity,” one that allows a culture both to register the new and revolutionary aspect of an emergent European sociohistorical reality and to function as a vehicle of its legitimation.¹ The modernity to which the bildungsroman responded, though, brought in its wake an array of tensions and hardships. Industrial capitalism, increased urbanization, and new opportunities for economic advancement were shadowed by the specter of affliction, marginalization, failure, and disillusionment. As Gretchen Braun notes, “Even as an increasingly literate populace eagerly consumed stories of self-actualization [as emblematized in the bildungsroman], many individuals whose gender and class limited their agency must surely have struggled to fully identify with the heroes of triumphant fictional accounts of individual success and community integration” (3). What forms of narrative embodiment, she wonders, might have been available to those unaccommodatable...