Contemporary Cultural Studies in Illness, Health and Medicine
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.
Metaphor in Illness Writing argues that even when a metaphor appears problematic and limiting, it need not be dropped or dismissed. Metaphors are not inherently harmful or beneficial; instead, they can be used in unexpected and creative ways. This book analyses the illness writing of contemporary North American writers who reimagine and reappropriate the supposedly harmful metaphor ‘illness is a fight’ and shows how Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Anatole Broyard, David Foster Wallace and other writers turn the fight metaphor into a space of agency, resistance, self-knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. It joins a conversation in Medical Humanities about alternatives to the predominance of narrative and responds to the call for more metaphor literacy and metaphor competence.
