In this book, Helmut Grugger describes how poetic texts create highly reflective engagements with the complex of psychological trauma, demonstrating that high-quality literature is of utmost interest for the various discourses on the topic of trauma. This important transdisciplinary theme is addressed through exemplary individual analyses - for the first time in a larger work that provides an overview of different approaches and is grounded in literary history. While theorists find the opening chapters particularly enlightening and practitioners find the results of the concluding section insightful, all those interested in literature can engage at any point in the two-hundred-year history of the texts.