Literature and Consolation

Jürgen Pieters teaches Literary Theory at Ghent University, Belgium. He is the author of Moments of Negotiation. The New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt (Amsterdam University Press, 2001) and Speaking With the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History (Edinburgh University Press, 2005).

In a year where many have needed the comfort reading fiction can bring, Pieters' exposition of the contemporary interest in bibliotherapy, which he grounds in detailed historical analysis from Homer to the present day, offers a warm and persuaive argument for the power of literary texts to console. [...] Pieters’ book therefore constitutes an offer to the reader that might confirm their own hopes about the power of literature; a power that is all too often denied in the face of more easily provable forms of care.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Fictions of Comfort1. The classical regime of literary comfort. From Homer to Aristotle2. The Christian Regime of Literary Comfort. From Boethius to Dante3. Toward a Modern Regime of Literary Comfort. Shakespeare and the Failure to Console4. The Religion of Despair. George Sand and Gustave Flaubert on Reading and Writing 5. Novels of Comfort. Woolf , Winnicott and the Work of Consolation6. Fragments of a Consolatory Discourse. Sontag, Riley, Proust, BarthesEpilogue: The Library of ComfortBibliographyIndex