'The horror of the world': Reconstructing trauma and mourning in the contemporary First World War writings of Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulks and Jane Urquhart

Both traumatic and traditional cultural remembrances of the First World War create a narrative discourse seen in the mediation of individual traumatic experience to social processes of mourning and bereavement. Using the cultural theories of Jay Winter and Jonathan Vance on social rituals of bereavement and mourning and the trauma theories of Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, this thesis examines the mediation of individual trauma into a cultural context through the ritual of testimony. Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth and Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That are shown to construct a traumatic template to bear witness to wartime trauma, enacted through the literary creation of traumatic testimony. Contemporary writers, however, cannot use such personal traumatic experience in depicting the First World War. Pat Barker's Regeneration, Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong and Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers instead create narrative authority through the traumatic and therapeutic "texts" at their centres.