Rethinking Therapeutic Reading: Lessons from Seneca, Montaigne, Wordsworth and George Eliot

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Through a combination of literary criticism and experimental psychology, Rethinking Therapeutic Reading reconsiders the role that serious literary reading might play in the real world, reclaiming literature as a vital tool for dealing with human troubles.

Rethinking Therapeutic Reading uses a combination of literary criticism and experimental psychology to examine the ways in which literature can create therapeutic spaces for personal thinking. It reconsiders the role that serious literary reading might play in the real world, reclaiming literature as a vital tool for dealing with human troubles.

Reviews

A highly valuable, timely and scholarly contribution to the current debate around the therapeutic power of literary reading. The book distinctively recovers a tradition of bibliotherapy in Western literature and culture as the basis for an empirically tested blueprint of literature-as-therapy for modern-day readers. Serious writing about serious reading.Josie Billington, Professor, Department of English Literature, University of Liverpool, UK

Close reading, as practised in this admirable book, will help us escape from habitual ways of thinking, make us suspicious of easily arrived at certainties and widen our sympathies. Readers, being also citizens, will thus be strengthened in the everyday struggle against fake news and downright lies.David Constantine, Writer and Translator

Author Bio

Kelda Green completed her PhD at the University of Liverpools Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society in 2018.