Metaphor in Illness Writing

Anita Wohlmann is Associate Professor in Contemporary Anglophone Literature at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense. She co-edited three anthologies, among them Narrative Medizin: Praxisbeispiele aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum (2021) and Narrating Disability in Literature and Visual Media (2019). She is the author of Aged Young Adults: Age Readings of Contemporary American Novels and Films (2014).

Metaphors in Illness Writing will be of great importance not only to literary scholars working in the fields of medical humanities and narrative medicine, but also to researchers and practitioners in the domain of medicine. It is one of the accomplishments of Wohlmann’s study that it consciously addresses both audiences. Despite this need to speak both to specialists in literary studies and to medical practitioners for whom the study of metaphor may seem quite novel, Wohlmann’s study never loses sight of the complexity of its topic: Metaphor in Illness Writing is highly complex and accessible at one and the same time, and it is tremendously well written.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionMetaphor Use: Strategies and MethodsSusan Sontag: Using Metaphor ‘to see more, to hear more, to feel more’Audre Lorde: Stretching, Risks and DifferenceAnatole Broyard: A Style for Being Ill; or, Metaphor ‘Light’David Foster Wallace’s Troubled Little Soldier: Narrative and IronyFrom Theory to Practice: A Method for Using MetaphorConclusionBibliographyIndex