The Literary Odyssey

In December 1997, an unknown Chinese American author named Iris Chang

published The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War Two. Her

passionate but error strewn account of a sixty-year-old episode of Asian political

violence was a spectacular success, with over half a million books sold. This

thesis asks why. Why that piece of history; why that moment; and why that

author and that book? It argues the most compelling answers to these questions

are found if the situation is viewed through the paradigmatic lens of trauma.

It therefore offers a theoretical reading of this important historical moment,

utilising key theorist, Jeffrey C. Alexander's social theory of cultural trauma. It

examines parallel historical and social processes in China and the West - centred

on trauma, representation and identity - which it argues Iris Chang connected

so profoundly with her book. It claims that The Rape of Nanking is structured to

utilise a framework of traumatic understanding constructed around the

Holocaust, the defining trauma of the epoch. This allowed her narrative to be

read and easily decoded by its audience in the now familiar register of trauma.