This book analyzes the various ways of coming to terms with the Emmett Till case in US fiction. The 1955 lynching of the fourteen-year-old black youth in the Mississippi Delta raised a cultural trauma in the US collective imaginary that particularly pierced the African American community, later resulting in a recurrent motif that this monograph conceptualizes as the Emmett Till trauma. This motif has historically permeated the whole spectrum of US society, springing up in manifold ways and artistic manifestations, but why does it continue to reverberate with such prominence nowadays? And...