ABSTRACT
This introduction emphasizes literature’s potential for social transformation and healing, suggesting a rising yet unrecognized current within literary criticism. Kate Rose challenges the assumption that literary criticism should be removed from life or that social engagement makes a scholar’s work less credible. Rose links all forms of traumatic memory, insofar as they act similarly upon the brain. She includes refugees, Indigenous people forced from their homelands, and children traumatized within their own homes. Discussing advances in neurology, Rose states the importance of narrative for healing survivors and bringing perpetrators to justice. Narrative reconstruction through literary study and fiction writing is an unexplored avenue within contemporary literary theory and psychiatry, suggesting an important potential contribution of literature that could be developed alongside the rise of narrative medicine within scientific fields. Amid a global crisis of migration, ongoing violence to Indigenous peoples, and inadequate understanding of traumatic memory in order to prevent hidden yet determinant violence against society’s most vulnerable, literary scholars revise theory in view of its radical decolonization and commitment to social justice. This ground-breaking introduction puts forth a socially useful and interdisciplinary perspective long overdue, combining sociology and literary analysis—an approach Kate Rose has named socioliterature.
