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Preface
My interest in Pat Barker's work goes back to the mid-90s, when I was a graduate student in English at Purdue University; I began out of order with the then-recently published Regeneration trilogy, which became part of the final section of my dissertation, Barker finding her place alongside Caryl Churchill, Michael Longley, Ciaran Carson, and Paul Muldoon and their representations of the human body as a text of resistance to the dominant power. The hysterics, pacifists, and homosexuals of the trilogy are not simply enemies of the state during wartime, because Barker—like Virginia Woolf—will not allow such simple, comfortable separation of the home front from the front line. The permeability, or perhaps the pure fiction, of that boundary between the public and the private continued as one of my major concerns in a monograph on representations of institutional violence that I began shortly after graduation, after having moved to France. Entitled “Le miroir de la société” largely because of the compelling uses Barker makes of mirror images throughout her work, Barker this time found her place alongside Anthony Burgess and Doris Lessing in a study of what I had termed “hard” and “soft” forms