Chronicling trauma
Subtitle: journalists and writers on violence and loss
By: Doug Underwood
Series: The history of communication
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Urbana, Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 244
ISBN-13: 9780252036408
Subjects: Mental health; Psychic trauma; War correspondents; Violence in literature; Press coverage; American Authors; Violence; Psychic trauma in literature; Psychology; Journalism and literature; Biography; Journalists
Description: To attract readers, journalists have long trafficked in the causes of trauma--crime, violence, warfare--as well as psychological profiling of deviance and aberrational personalities. Novelists, in turn, have explored these same subjects in developing their characters and by borrowing from their own traumatic life stories to shape the themes and psychological terrain of their fiction. In this book, Doug Underwood offers a conceptual and historical framework for comprehending the impact of trauma and violence in the careers and the writings of important journalist-literary figures in the United States and British Isles from the early 1700s to today. Grounded in the latest research in the fields of trauma studies, literary biography, and the history of journalism, this study draws upon the lively and sometimes breathtaking accounts of popular writers such as Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, and Truman Capote, exploring the role that trauma has played in shaping their literary works. Underwood notes that the influence of traumatic experience upon journalistic literature is being reshaped by a number of factors, including news media trends, the advance of the Internet, the changing nature of the journalism profession, the proliferation of psychoactive drugs, and journalists' greater self-awareness of the impact of trauma in their work. The most extensive scholarly examination of the role that trauma has played in the shaping of our journalistic and literary heritage, Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss discusses more than a hundred writers whose works have won them fame, even at the price of their health, their families, and their lives.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction. Trauma, news, and narrative: the study of violence and loss in journalism and fiction; title: Stories of harm, stories of hazard: childhood stress and professional trauma in the careers of journalist-literary figures; title: Trafficking in trauma: women's rights, civil rights, and sensationalism as a spur to social justice; title: Trauma in war, trauma in life: the pose of the "heroic" battlefield correspondent; title: Depression, drink, and dissipation: dysfunctional lifestyles and  art as the ultimate stimulant; title: Epilogue. New challenges, new treatments: trauma and the contemporary journalist-literary figure.