This series promotes inquiry into the relationship between literary texts and their cultural and intellectual contexts, in theoretical, interpretative and historical perspectives. It has developed out of a research initiative of the German Department at Cambridge University, but its focus of interest is on the European tradition broadly perceived. Its purpose is to encourage comparative and interdisciplinary research into the connections between cultural history and the literary imagination generally.

Martin Modlinger has studied English Literature and Linguistics, History and Ethics of Textual Cultures at the Universities of Munich, Perth and Erlangen-Nuremberg. He is currently a doctoral student in the Department of German and Dutch at the University of Cambridge. Philipp Sonntag has studied English Literature, Philosophy, Political Science and Ethics of Textual Cultures at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He is currently a doctoral student in the Department of English/American and Romance Studies at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Contents: Martin Modlinger/Philipp Sonntag: Introduction: Other People’s Pain - Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics – Colin Davis: Trauma and Ethics: Telling the Other’s Story – Aleida Assmann: From Collective Violence to a Common Future: Four Models for Dealing with a Traumatic Past – Susannah Radstone: Trauma Studies: Contexts, Politics, Ethics – María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro: Narrating the Holocaust and its Legacy: The Complexities of Identity, Trauma and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s – Bettina Bannasch: Zero - A Gaping Mouth: The Discourse of the Camps in Herta Müller’s between Literary Theory and Political Philosophy – Hubert Zapf: Trauma, Narrative and Ethics in Recent American Fiction – Rudolf Freiburg: Trauma as Normalcy: Pain in Philip Roth’s – Susana Onega: Trauma, Shame and Ethical Responsibility for the Death of the Other in J. M. Coetzee’s Inhaltsverzeichnis