Heike Bartel – författare

Unbinding Medea signals the very different answers to medea to provoke debate that transcends individual and discipline-specific approaches to the reception of her myth from antiquity to the twenty-first century and to present interdisciplinary parameters of engagement.

Masculinities and Mental Health explores literary texts, images, and performances which engage with the under-explored topic of eating disorders in men. Eating disorders are psychiatric illnesses commonly associated with females only. The fact that men can suffer from anorexia, bulimia, binge-eating disorder, and other types of eating disorders too, presents a challenge not only to healthcare disciplines but also to public and cultural perceptions. Exploring eating disorders in boys and men, this book scrutinizes standardised concepts of masculinity and male mental health in contemporary discourse. It sets out to open up spaces for underrepresented experiences recognizing the urgency of this endeavour both as a matter of public health and as a challenge to entrenched cultural assumptions about who can develop, experience, and recover from an eating disorder. Drawing on clinical, socio-cultural, historical, and lived experience perspectives, the interdisciplinary author team aims to fill the gaps often left by single-discipline work. Emphasizing the plural of masculinities, the book explores how stereotypes of ‘manly’ strength or stoicism can obscure vulnerabilities and marginalize those whose experiences fall outside a normative script. It places personal accounts by boys and men with eating disorders, expressed through writing and other art forms, centre-stage. The volume offers readers living testimonies that challenge and enrich our understanding of diagnostic categories, as well as the ways in which eating disorders, masculinity, and male embodiment are manifested.

Eating disorders are situated at the complex interface of biology, medicine, culture, society, and politics, and are seen differently from each perspective. This book brings together discussions of eating, food, gender, sexuality and mental health through analysis of published autobiographical narratives authored by men with experience of living with one of the main eating disorders (anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorder) as well as associated mental health problems such as body dysmorphic disorder and depression. Written by a literary scholar, the book speaks with authority on the value of literary narratives for much-needed qualitative research and training on the lived experience of eating disorders in men.With its transnational and comparative focus on texts from the US, UK, Germany, and Austria, Men Writing Eating Disorders will appeal to readers working across the arts and humanities and science disciplines. Its interdisciplinary approach offers new insights for readers interested in autobiography, illness narratives, Gender Studies and Critical Masculinity Studies; for scholars keen to explore the nexus of the arts, humanities and sciences within the emerging disciplines of Health Humanities and Medical Humanities; and for healthcare professionals and clinical researchers who recognize the importance of personal narratives in training and practice.

Unbinding Medea signals the very different answers to medea to provoke debate that transcends individual and discipline-specific approaches to the reception of her myth from antiquity to the twenty-first century and to present interdisciplinary parameters of engagement.

Anne Duden’s reputation as one of the most innovative writers of her generation, established in 1982 with the experimental stories in Übergang, was confirmed in 1985 by Das Judasschaf, a novel interweaving an individual’s anguish with the cultural trauma of the German past. In her acclaimed poem cycles Steinschlag (1993) and Hingegend (1999) Duden pushes the limits of language in densely metaphoric evocations of landscapes and places of political and personal remembrance, mixing lament for ruined nature with grotesque comedy, mystic vision with horror. Duden is a distinguished practitioner of short forms. Her essays display the same intense engagement with the visual arts as informs her narrative texts. Her deep interest in music is echoed in the musicality of short prose poems.This volume presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of approaches to Duden's fiction, poetry and essays by international scholars. Topics include: the ethics and aesthetics of Duden’s engagement with German history; her constructions of female subjectivity; her criticism of western dualistic thinking with its devaluation of the body and exploitation of nature; her position within a modernist tradition with roots in the Romantic Age; the visual arts and poetic influences such as Hölderlin and Celan; the dilemmas of translating Duden’s highly individual style. Three essays on Steinschlag constitute the first systematic reading of this difficult, much praised cycle.