Introduction: Non-realism: the Once and Future Reality or Twice Abused Bodies and the Question of Agency

Abstract

Embedded in the theorisation of violence and its narratives, this study sees Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits as being representative of a unique subcategory of the contemporary novel. This sub-category revisits sites of extreme or intense violence in the lives both of its protagonists and of the collective to which they belong in the process of defining the identity of that collective; each of these novels deals with a different historical event of violence.