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After a short period of independence, Estonia was occupied in World
War II by the Red Army, then Nazi Germany, and again, for a lasting
occupation, by the Soviets. No wonder that a greater part of the
roughly one million Estonians had harshly eventful lives. This
anthology contains 25 selected life stories collected from
Estonians who lived through the tribulations of the 20th century,
and describe the travails of ordinary people under numerous
regimes. The autobiographical accounts provide authentic
perspectives on events of this period, where time is placed in the
context of life-spans, and subjects grounded in personal
experience. Most of the life stories reveal sufferings under
foreign (Russian) oppression. The product of a large-scale national
project to record history by collecting autobiographical accounts,
and a process of engaged selection for publication which followed.
The variety of life-experiences recorded offers comparison across
cultures, as well as an overview of the powerful neighbors as they
relinquish and strengthen their hold on Estonia.
Exploring life writing from a variety of cultural contexts, Haunted
Narratives provides new insights into how individuals and
communities across time and space deal with traumatic experiences
and haunting memories. From the perspectives of trauma theory,
memory studies, gender studies, literary studies, philosophy, and
post-colonial studies, the volume stresses the lingering, haunting
presence of the past in the present. The contributors focus on the
psychological, ethical, and representational difficulties involved
in narrative negotiations of traumatic memories. Haunted Narratives
focuses on life writing in the broadest sense of the term:
biographies and autobiographies that deal with traumatic
experiences, autobiographically inspired fictions on loss and
trauma, and limit-cases that transcend clear-cut distinctions
between the factual and the fictional. In discussing texts as
diverse as Toni Morrison's Beloved, Vikram Seth's Two Lives,
deportation narratives of Baltic women, Christa Wolf's
Kindheitsmuster, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, and Ene Mihkelson's
Ahasveeruse uni, the contributors add significantly to current
debates on life writing, trauma, and memory; the contested notion
of "cultural trauma"; and the transferability of
clinical-psychological notions to the study of literature and
culture.
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