Bearing Witness to Global Traumas in Canadian Fiction

Bearing Witness to Global Traumas in Canadian Fiction expands our understanding of testimonial literature, arguing that readers act as second-hand witnesses to historical and global traumas. Focusing on Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces, Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo, and Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage—novels about the Holocaust, transatlantic slavery, Bosnia, and Burma—Beckman-Long uses close readings and narratological analyses to reveal an emerging literary movement seeking new ethical communities. The author demonstrates how these Canadian novelists contribute to social and political change by altering perspectives on traumatic histories. By crossing boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, the testimonial novel re-imagines encounters for writers, characters, and readers—offering something distinct from memoir. Drawing on autobiography and trauma theories, this study compares the novels’ narrative techniques and readers’ positions, modeling foundational literary scholarship. This is an essential book for scholars of Canadian, postcolonial, and testimonial literature, as well as autobiography studies and trauma theory. https://doi.org/10.29173/uap4pi3kzuw