RT Journal Article
T1 Resilience as Regeneration in Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life
A1 Domínguez García, Beatriz
AB In Life After Life (2013), British writer Kate Atkinson returns to the rewriting of History asher-story that characterized her early fiction. The protagonist’s lifespan overlaps with the majorhistorical events of the twentieth century, allowing the writer to explore how those affected the individuallives of women and, at the same time, problematizing history, memory, and the past. Above all, LifeAfter Life highlights the deep vulnerability of women to systemic gender violence, although it alsoemphasizes women’s resilience. The purpose of this paper is to examine Atkinson’s peculiar renderingof resilience, which interestingly she locates in the body, rather than in the mind. I contend that in LifeAfter Life resilience results from the combination of embodied memory and emotional forgetting. Theformer—a kind of sixth sense that instinctively steers Ursula away from danger—facilitates women’ssurvival, while the latter ensures the character’s psychological welfare. My analysis also considers thisnovel and its protagonist as an important departure from Atkinson’s earlier fiction, because theprotagonist is given a way out. This power, however, comes at a cost, for in order to forget, first sheneeds to die. However, since rebirth is a creative license and patently impossible in real-life terms,Atkinson seems to establish the impossibility of victims to put an end to their own victimization and,likewise, the ability to “recover” from that bodily violence through its physical erasure. In this respect,one may wonder whether Atkinson is just questioning the ability of female victims to be resilient,whether resilience can be a viable discourse for recovering from gender violence and, finally, whethercultural texts can successfully present female resilience at all.
PB Purdue University Press
SN 1481-4374
YR 2019
FD 2019-03
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10272/16422
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10272/16422
LA eng
NO Domínguez García, B. (2019). Resilience as Regeneration in KateAtkinson's Life After Life. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 21(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3378
NO The authors wish to acknowledge the funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Research Project "Bodies in Transit 2," ref. FFI2017-84555-C2-1-P) and the European Regional Development Fund for the writing of this essay.
NO info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Research Project "Bodies in Transit 2") [FFI2017-84555-C2-1-P]
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 1 jun 2026