The introductory chapter provides an overview of the development and current situation of literary trauma studies. Originally referring to a physical wound, trauma has become an important lens through which we understand the most distressing individual and collective experiences. Its modern sense emerged out of the medical and legal concerns of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, and it was refined through Freud’s development of psychoanalysis and, later in the twentieth century, through the official recognition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a medical condition. In the humanities, the work of Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra and others played a pivotal role in establishing trauma as a tool for the analysis of aspects of literature, culture and history. The chapter discusses some of the issues currently facing literary and cultural trauma studies, and outlines the structure of the volume, which ranges over the history, ongoing concerns and possible future developments of trauma studies.