Cicely Saunders and Total Pain

Over the last fifty years, texts and other cultural productions on illness, health, and medicine have flourished across a variety of genres and media, including: novels and short fiction of illness, disease, disability, and death; illness memoirs; confessional and elegiac poetry; carers’ narratives; children’s and young adult fiction; reportage and advocatory journalism; popular medical and science writing; graphic fiction and memoir; patient and service user ‘zines’ and online resources; popular guides and manuals, including self-help; commercial, documentary and auteur cinema and television; theatrical texts and productions. The COVID-19 pandemic will no doubt stimulate further activity. This book series fosters critical readings of such cultural productions, with an openness to variety in genre, medium, and cultural capital. The series expects scholarly rigour and theoretical acumen, but no single theoretical or methodological standpoint is stipulated. Readers will encounter innovative and sustained critical readings that respond to the cutting – or bleeding – edge of contemporary cultures of illness, health, and medicine.

Series Advisory Board:

Dr Stella Bolaki, Reader in American Literature and Medical Humanities, University of Kent

Dr Lucy Burke, Principal Lecturer in English, Manchester Metropolitan University

Dr Ann Jurecic, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University

Prof. Anne Whitehead, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature, University of Newcastle

Dr Anita Wohlmann, Associate Professor, Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark

Key features:

• Focus on English-language cultural productions in period c.1970-present
• Inclusive approach to genre, medium, method and theory
• Open to high culture, popular culture and subculture
• Responsive to contemporary cultures, including the immediate present
• Open to both monographs and edited collections

To submit, email your proposal to Emily Sharp Literary Studies Commissioning Editor. Find our proposal guidelines here.

If you would like to discuss your proposal before submission, email the series editor, Gavin Miller.