Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities
About the Book Series
This series offers ground-breaking literary scholarship relevant to the field of health humanities. It pursues new understandings of the way that literature represents and engages with healthcare, health and well-being. The series will enfold and extend beyond purely medical perspectives to consider a range of non-medical and culturally defined aspects of what it means to be healthy. Aimed at interdisciplinary researchers, academics and health and social care professionals interested in care-related literary investigation these studies pursue innovative kinds of theory and application. Importantly, this series recognises the very real contribution that literature can make to knowledge and creative practices in the delivery of human well-being. The scholarship also investigates literature as social and cultural assets for physical and mental public health.
Self-Literacy: Writing Out Personhood
1st Edition
By Alan Bleakley
August 22, 2025
Self-Literacy: Writing Out Personhood offers fifty perspectives on gaining an understanding of what ‘personhood’ may mean through various disciplines. Literature is a key medium through which selves are mapped as humans are written into being. Such literature is intimately tied to health such as ...
Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds: Mental Health in Victorian Literature
1st Edition
By Mathilde Vialard
June 26, 2025
Drawing on the recent academic interest in approaching health and wellbeing from a humanities perspective, Sensation Novels and Domestic Minds investigates how the Victorians dealt with questions of mental health by examining literary works in the genre of sensation fiction. The novels of Mary ...
Canadian Literature and Medicine: Carelanding
1st Edition
By Shane Neilson
December 18, 2024
Canadian Literature and Medicine breaks new ground by formulating a series of frameworks with which to read and interpret a national literature derived from the very fabric of that literature – in this case Canadian. Canadian literature is of particular interest because of its consideration of ...
Grief Memoirs: Cultural, Supportive, and Therapeutic Significance
1st Edition
By Katarzyna A. Małecka
December 18, 2024
Grief Memoirs: Cultural, Supportive, and Therapeutic Significance bridges literary studies and psychology to evaluate contemporary grief memoirs for use by bereaved and non-bereaved individuals. This volume positions the grief memoir within life writing and bereavement studies through examination ...
Narrative Fiction and Death: Dying Imagined
1st Edition
By Sabine Köllmann
December 18, 2024
Narrative Fiction and Death: Dying Imagined offers a new perspective on the study of death in literature. It focuses on narrative fiction that conveys the experience of dying from the internal perspective of a dying protagonist. Writers from Victor Hugo in the early 1800s to Elif Shafak in the...
Narratives of Injury: Nineteenth-Century Coalfields Fiction
1st Edition
By Rosalyn Buckland
November 29, 2024
Narratives of Injury redescribes the history of injury from the perspective of those most at risk, rather than medical professionals and other outsiders. Refocusing on the first-hand perspectives found in literary texts and journalistic accounts, it uncovers a self-conscious tradition of mining ...
Health, Literature and Women in Twentieth-Century Turkey: Bodies of Exception
1st Edition
By Şima İmşir
October 09, 2024
Health, Literature and Women in Twentieth-Century Turkey offers readers fresh insight into Turkish modernity and its discourse on health, what it excludes and how these potentialities manifest themselves in women’s fiction to shape the imagination of the period. Starting from the nineteenth ...
John Donne’s Language of Disease: Eloquent Blood
1st Edition
By Alison Bumke
October 09, 2024
John Donne’s Language of Disease reveals the influence of medical knowledge – a rapidly changing field in early modern England – on the poetry and prose of John Donne (1572–1631). This knowledge played a crucial role in shaping how Donne understood his everyday experiences, and how he conveyed ...
The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies
1st Edition
By Judith Harris
October 08, 2024
The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies presents a renewed look at elegy as a long-standing tradition in the literature of loss, exploring recent shifts in the continuum of these memorial poems. This volume investigates the tensions arising in elegiac formulations of grief through ...
Experiencing Epiphanies in Literature and Cinema: Arts and Humanities for Sustainable Well-being
1st Edition
By Bradley Lewis
July 09, 2024
Experiencing Epiphanies in Literature and Cinema uses health humanities and psychological humanities to explore literary and cinematic epiphanies. James Joyce first adopted the term “epiphany” from its religious use to articulate momentsof luminous intensity or “sudden spiritual manifestation.” ...
Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine
1st Edition
By Manon Mathias
April 30, 2024
Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine offers a new way of conceptualizing food in literature: not as social or cultural symbol but as an agent within a network of relationships between body and mind and between humans and environment. By analysing ...
Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media
1st Edition
Edited
By Başak Ağın, Şafak Horzum
January 29, 2024
This multi-vocal assemblage of literary and cultural responses to contagions provides insights into the companionship of posthumanities, environmental humanities, and medical humanities to shed light on how we deal with complex issues like communicable diseases in contemporary times. Examining ...