The Poetics of Otherness ― War, Trauma, and Literature

"The poetics of otherness combines two strange and familiar ideas, that of making and what is different from ourselves. The book stresses war, trauma and literature, and the wound is explored from the destruction of indigenous peoples after Columbus to the Holocaust and beyond both in poetry and prose. This study examines Bartolomae Las Casas' representation of this trauma and destruction in the Americas; the literary in terms of literature and critical discourse as a place of identity and otherness; violence and trauma in Shakespeare and his contemporaries; travel, alterity and culture, including the journey of Matteo Ricci and his editor, of the manuscript; the trauma of war and violence as expressed in poetry; representations of the Great War, especially concerning the role of aboriginal Canadians; poets writing in and about the First World War; poems about the Second World War; voices from the Holocaust or Shoah"--