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In Another World (1998), Pat Barker skilfully uses gothic elements to illustrate the complex nature of intergenerational trauma. The novel follows the story of war and murder in three dysfunctional families during the Victorian period, the WWI era, and modern times, bringing to light the transmission of victimisation and perpetration of trauma across generations. These three generations, marked by recurring traumatic experiences of war and fratricide, are connected through the main character and focaliser (Nick) and the family house (Lob’s Hill) into which Nick and his family have recently moved. As a witness, Nick struggles with the impacts of witnessing others’ (the Fanshawes’, his grandfather’s, and his own family’s) traumatic experiences and often opts to ignore or forget these experiences as his way of coping. This presentation explores the relationship between gothic elements and trauma fiction in Pat Barker's Another World. The novel serves as a rich example of trauma fiction, employing gothic elements such as gothic setting, theme, and plot; supernatural events and spectre;and frame narrative and framing devices to represent the complexities of trauma. Barker uses these literary devices to emphasise themes like hauntedness, unspeakability, and amnesia and narrative techniques like repetition, recurrences, the collapse of temporality,resistance to closure, and intertextuality in trauma fiction. Therefore, this presentation analyses how gothic elements can enrich the representation of intergenerational trauma complexities of traumatic experiences in trauma fiction.
