ABSTRACT
Trauma refers to psychological injury, lasting damage done to individuals or communities by tragic events or severe distress. Trauma theory in its forms grows out of the medical and legal concerns of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution. The medical discourse on trauma was entangled with legal discourse as those affected, whether in the war or in factory or other workplace accidents, sought legal compensation for their psychological injuries. Trauma has therefore a dual genealogy: it has emerged as a medical, psychological and psychiatric concept that is a universally recognized diagnostic category, but it has also emerged as a category of social discourse that has a strongly moral significance. Trauma theory grows, then, out of the complex interaction of suffering, law, ethics and medicine. Literary trauma studies as a particular branch of work in the humanities has its own separate but related and interdependent genealogy.
