Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Women, Trauma Autofiction, and the End of the Portuguese Empire: Self-Camouflage as Survival

Women, Trauma Autofiction, and the End of the Portuguese Empire: Self-Camouflage as Survival

Hardcover

Series: Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

Literary Criticism

PREORDER - Expected ship date November 20, 2026

ISBN10: 3032411041
ISBN13: 9783032411044
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: Nov 20 2026
Language: English

This book examines how Portuguese women writers narrate the traumatic impact of decolonisation and the Colonial War through autofictional form. Focusing on works by Lídia Jorge, Isabela Figueiredo, and Dulce Maria Cardoso, the book argues that autofiction provides a formally elastic mode through which traumatic experiences that resist linear narration can be articulated without requiring full emotional exposure or testimonial transparency. As the first academic monograph devoted to Portuguese autofiction, the study examines how the selected works use textual and visual strategies--including fragmentation, narrative distance, photography, and linguistic constraint--to represent the unresolved legacies of empire. The book develops the concept of autofictional self-camouflage, theorised as a strategy that regulates authorial exposure and vulnerability while enabling sustained engagement with complex and contested colonial histories. Organised into two parts--Narrating the Self and Narrating Others--it traces how trauma is mediated unevenly across gendered, racialised, and familial relations shaped by colonial power. In doing so, the book situates Portuguese women's trauma autofiction at the intersection of memory, form, and post-imperial critique, demonstrating how literary experimentation can make traumatic histories narratable and available for recognition without imposing resolution, recovery, or closure.

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