Literature and Medicine

Anna M. Elsner (BA Oxon MA PhD Cantab) is Associate Professor of French Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of St Gallen. She is PI of the ERC project ASSISTED and was awarded the Marie Heim-Vögtlin Prize 2022 for outstanding women researchers by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Monika Pietrzak-Franger is Professor of British Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Vienna and specializes in Medical Humanities, adaptation, transmediality and (neo-)Victorianism. She is PI of the interuniversity cluster Post-Covid-19 Care. She received the BritCult Award (2015) for her VW-founded project Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture (2014).

Part I. Origins: Histories: 1. Guts, hollows, and coils: Inside stories in ancient literature Chiara Thumiger; 2. Medieval affect, the book of Margery Kempe, and medical treatments of the embodied Self Holly A. Crocker; 3. Epidemiological language in Robert Burton's the anatomy of melancholy Jennifer Radden; 4. Illness and the novel aesthetics Hosanna Krienke; 5. Embodies traumas in twentieth and twenty-first century literature Alan Gibbs; Part II. Developments: Forms: 6. Illness and the 'fall' of language Steven Wilson; 7. Translating chronic pain and the ethics of reading in the personal essay Marie Allitt; 8. Physician-poets and vitalist theories of life James Morland; 9. Healthcare anecdotes and the medically anecdotal Brian Hurwitz; 10. Literary realism and mental breakdown Josie Billington; 11. Time and narrative in the age of postnatural death: Maylis de Kerangal's the heart Jared Stark; 12. Performance and/as contagion in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic Małgorzata Sugiera; 13. The parallel chart as medico-literary practice Daniel Eison; 14. Articulating the experiential in graphic medicine Kimberly R. Myers; Part III. Applications: Politics: 15. Malaria literature: (Post) colonial perspectives, infection, and the question of mobility Jessica Howell and Oishani Sengupta; 16. Forgotten class: French literature, medicine, and poverty Loïc Bourdeau; 17. The human endeavor: bioethics and biocapitalism in Don DeLillo's Zero K Justin Omar Johnston; 18. Re-framing and Re-forming disability and literature Susannah B. Mintz; 19. Overcoming decline (in) Narrative: Epdisodicity in stories of dementia and ageing Martina Zimmermann; 20. Literature as a form of care? From therapeutic narratives to the literature of care Alexandre Gefen; 21. Literature in collaboration: The work of literature in the critical medical humanities Angela Woods and James Rákóczi; Afterword: Medicine and literature after COVID-19 Anna M. Elsner and Monika Pietrzak-Franger.