Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror : Images of Insecurity, Narratives of Captivity
Author(s): Susana Araújo
Extending the study of post-9/11 literature to include transnational perspectives, this book explores the ways in which contemporary writers from Europe as well as the USA have responded to the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the ensuing 'war on terror.' Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the 'War on Terror' demonstrates the ways in which contemporary fiction has wrestled with anxieties about national and international security in the 21st century.
Reading a wide range of novels by such writers as Amy Waldman, Michael Cunningham, Frédéric Beigbeder, Ian McEwan, Joseph O'Neill, Moshin Hamid, José Saramago, Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie, Susana Araújo explores how the rhetoric of the 'war on terror' has shaped recent representations of the city and how “security” discourses circulate transatlantically and transnationally. By focusing not only on 9/11 but also on the way subsequent events such as the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq are represented in fiction, this book demonstrates how notions of “terror” and “insecurity” have been absorbed, reworked or critiqued in fiction. Araújo examines to what extent transatlantic relations have reinforced or challenged new fictions of “white western middle class captivity.”
Review(s):
“Susana Araújo’s incisive and convincing study, Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror: Images of Insecurity, Narratives of Captivity … views the 9/11 novel as contributing to a long and diverse literary history of European and American captivity narratives … Araújo’s erudite and highly useful study illuminates how contemporary 9/11 fictions are reversing the role of captor and captive to depict Western subjects as being exceptionally vulnerable to global acts of terror and violence. With original close readings of critically acclaimed novels, this study offers new directions for further research into how the boundaries of the 9/11 novel may be expanded to account for US conceptions, both historical and contemporary, about its own vulnerability amidst territorial occupation and intervention.” –Journal of American Culture
ISBN: 9781350030381