Writing Under Duress: Trauma and Repetition in Early England, 1065-1250

"Writing Under Duress: Trauma and Repetition in Early England, 1065-1250" investigates the so-called “lost” period of English literary history: the two-hundred-year aftermath of the Norman Conquest of 1066, when literatures in English were thought to have all but disappeared. Rather than working to combat claims of loss, as others working in this period have done, this dissertation embraces the richness of loss – of sovereign(ty), of land, of life, of language, of desire – for all it can tell us about the textual and historical motivations of the post-Conquest English. Writing Under Duress treats trauma as a dynamic force that can be reconfigured as a tool of historical analysis for premodern texts. By revising theoretical frameworks to account for medieval conceptualizations of suffering (and allowing these forms of suffering to generate their own theories of trauma), this dissertation exposes trauma studies to a new range of subjectivities that helpfully challenge the assumed modern, Western, secular subject at the heart of contemporary theorizations of trauma.