Literature and Chronic Pain: Reading for Healing

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

This valuable and insightful study into chronic pain and its treatment advances a striking analysis of the complex phenomenon of chronic pain, also attesting to the importance of the medical humanities in addressing urgent questions that medical science alone cannot resolve. The primary purpose of this book is twofold. First, to demonstrate empirically against a conceptual background drawn from multiple disciplines and knowledge bases (historical, medical, neurobiological, psychological, socio/anthropological) how an apparently soft intervention such as literary reading can effectively combat symptoms of a condition as intractable as chronic pain. Second, to explore what this evidence tells us about pain (as a lived experience as well as a condition in urgent need of new treatment options) and about literature and the reading of fiction and poetry as therapeutic influences in contemporary health and healthcare, most particularly in alleviating the (often severe) mental health difficulties with which chronic pain is almost universally associated. Based on unique empirical research with people who are living with chronic pain, this book is the first of its kind to demonstrate the value of literature and literary reading both as a discourse for understanding pain and as an intervention in its treatment.

Reviews

How can something as apparently soft as reading fiction and poetry influence a condition as intractable as chronic pain This is the guiding question of Josie Billington's remarkable Literature and Chronic Pain. Ten years in the making, what lies at its heart is a series of moving case studies that reveal how the shared reading aloud and discussion of literature can bring forms of therapeutic relief. This book should be required reading for literary scholars and physicians alike for how it helps us better understand the mind-body problem and the mystery of human experience. * Kay Young, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara *

Author Bio

Josie Billington teaches in the School of English, University of Liverpool, UK. Her publications include Faithful Realism (2002), Eliot's Middlemarch (2008) and an edition of Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (2006).