Reading Literature and Chronic Pain

Josie Billington is Professor in English Literature at the University of Liverpool, UK. She has edited and published extensively on Victorian women's fiction and poetry including 21st Century Oxford Authors: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, and Margaret Oliphant's The Ladies Lindores. She has also led multiple inter-disciplinary studies on the value of literary reading for health. Her publications in this field include Is Literature Healthy? (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Reading and Mental Health (Palgrave, 2019).

This is an accomplished book on an important and pressing topic, advancing a striking analysis of the complex phenomenon of chronic pain. It also attests to the importance of the medical humanities in addressing urgent questions that medical science alone cannot resolve.

• PrefacePart One Chronic Pain Where is it? What is it?:Pain as Symptom, Experience, and Idea (past and present)1. Chronic Pain: The Clinical Picture2. Pain and Meaning3. Pain: Body and Mind4. Pain and LanguagePart Two ‘In Reading’: Chronic Pain, Literature, Therapy5. Why Reading?: Starting-points and Key Concepts6. Memory, Time and Loss: Encountering the Past7. Changing the Story8. Finding a Language9. Shared Reading and Intersubjectivity: The GroupPart Three Reading not Talking: Pain, Trauma, Treatment10. Pain and StucknessAfterwordSelect BibliographyIndex