Gendered postmemorial legacyLily Brett’s and Elizabeth Rosner’s poetic renditions of the Holocaust

  1. Miñano, Laura 1
  1. 1 Universitat de València
    info

    Universitat de València

    Valencia, España

    ROR https://ror.org/043nxc105

Journal:
Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos

ISSN: 0210-6124

Year of publication: 2023

Volume: 45

Issue: 2

Pages: 263-286

Type: Article

DOI: 10.28914/ATLANTIS-2023-45.2.13 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDialnet editor

More publications in: Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos

Abstract

This article explores Lily Brett’s The Auschwitz Poems (2004) and Elizabeth Rosner’s Gravity (2014), two female-authored second-generation poetic renditions of the Holocaust. Examining these works through the lens of postmemory, my goal is to shed new light on the intergenerational transmission of trauma from a gendered perspective, focusing on its connections with poetry. I argue that both anthologies share at the core of their narrative a gender-focused layer of meaning, which penetrates into a postmemorial experience that is to a great extent defined by this social construct. This essay fosters scholarship on postmemory by conceiving it as a double-edged process encompassing both aesthetics and a form of social activism, and informed by feminism, which is mirrored in the reconception and rethinking of both the female body and gender hierarchy.

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