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Guest Editor's Introduction: Pain's Plurals and Narrative Disruption: Communicating Pain and Honoring Its Telling Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Sara Wasson
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Guest Editor's Introduction:Pain's Plurals and Narrative Disruption: Communicating Pain and Honoring Its Telling Sara Wasson (bio) How to narrate an illnessin fairer climates andto fair-weather figures. * How not to. —Amy Allara1 Pain may be a wind, a mist, live burial, a rubbish tip, a concrete suit, shattered glass, a knife.2 Discussions
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Essaying Pain Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Ann Jurecic
Abstract: Narrative has long been central to the study of literature about illness, but we err if we assume that memoir and fiction alone depict the embodied experience of physical suffering. Contemporary writers also turn to the essay. In French, essayer means to attempt, and writing essays requires facing difficult questions and predicaments, confronting uncertainty and the unknown. Among recent
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Anguish in Language: Pain as a Biocultural Experience in Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Daniel Direkoglu
Abstract: Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) represents physical pain as a multidimensional experience entwined with history, language, and culture. By linking descriptions of anti-Black racist encounters with the imagery of somatic aches, Rankine blurs the boundaries between psychological suffering and physical distress to offer readers a nuanced depiction of the way racist discourse
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The Pain of Residential Schools in Canada: An Analysis of Silence and Narrative Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Wade Paul
Abstract: In operation for over a century, the Indian Residential School system is a painful part of Canadian history. Through the theoretical approaches to pain envisioned by Elaine Scarry, Javier Moscoso, and Ilit Ferber, this article examines how the pain of residential school experiences manifests as silence among residential school survivors. Through a close analysis of narratives that break free
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"Your Tiny White Vests, Unworn": Contemporary Elegies of Maternal Loss Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Anne Whitehead
Abstract: This essay asks whether poetry can articulate the experience of maternal loss, paying particular attention to questions of form. Focusing on two British poetry collections, Rebecca Goss's Her Birth (2013) and Karen McCarthy Woolf's An Aviary of Small Birds (2014), I argue that the contemporary elegy is currently being reshaped to explore the grief of losing a baby, and to bear witness to
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Staying with Narrative: Stories of Shame and Gynecological Pain Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Katharine Cheston
Abstract: Storytelling is good for us—or so we are told. This article examines two memoirs, by Hilary Mantel and Susanna Kaysen, in which narrating experiences of gynecological pain provokes shame and deepens pain. By attending to shame as a textual presence, I intervene in a longstanding debate about how to make sense of pain and illness. Shame, I argue, reveals the presence of multiple (and often
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Authoring Pain: Fragmentation and Autofiction in Maggie Nelson's Bluets Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Maria Vaccarella
Abstract: This article analyzes Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) as a prominent example of the fragmentary narration that can result from the experience of pain and loss. I demonstrate how Nelson's disparate ruminations on her obsession for the color blue, her heartbreak, and her quadriplegic friend's chronic pain defy the superimposition of a teleological plot over these experiences, in favor of episodic
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Strange and Tender Fracture: Flash Illness Writing, Chronic Pain, and Alternatives to "Resilience" Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Sara Wasson
Abstract: How might flash writing be useful in communicating chronic pain? This question drove the UKRI AHRC-funded project Translating Chronic Pain at Lancaster University (2017–2019), which focused on the potential of fragmentary, episode-driven forms. This article examines how the ultra-short form and navigation architectures of the Translating Pain online anthology facilitate a polyphony of responses
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Vehement Experiences: The Inscription and Description of Delusion in Nineteenth-century French Asylums Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Javier Moscoso
Abstract: This essay explores the differences in the narrative forms of mental illness, depending on whether the sources consulted come from published medical histories or archival material. Based on the study of dozens of clinical cases contained in, above all, the institutions of Charenton and Bicêtre, from the late eighteenth century to the 1850s, I argue that the distinctive feature of the clinical
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Crime Fiction and the Knowing of Pain Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Susannah B. Mintz
Abstract: Recent studies of pain have disputed the idea that pain eludes representation in language. Where these have largely focused on the experience of pain, my paper examines the epistemological function of pain in crime fiction, a genre that by definition foregrounds meaning: what and how we know. A good crime story depends structurally on resolution, but its pleasure derives more thoroughly from
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Attending Pain, Ethnographically Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Megan Crowley-Matoka
Abstract: What might ethnography—as both practice and text—offer for thinking about and with non-narrative forms of pain representation? Ethnography operates as an inherently fragmentary, episodic form of knowledge-making: the central acts of observing and writing social life rest upon moments plucked and crafted from the unruly, relentless rush of intersubjective experience. Bringing an ethnographic
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Editor's Foreword: Remembering Carol Donley Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Michael Blackie
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Editor's Foreword:Remembering Carol Donley Michael Blackie The field of Literature and Medicine has lost one of its most passionate early proponents. Carol Donley, cofounder of Hiram College's Center for Literature and Medicine and the Literature and Medicine book series published by Kent State University Press, among other remarkable
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Foreword to Front Matter: Recovery Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Michael Blackie
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Foreword to Front Matter:Recovery Michael Blackie We all know something about recovery. The return of a lost object, like health or dignity, maybe a cherished memento, or a talisman from another time. It is a narrative driven experience, propelled by expectation, a story we tell to make sense of what can be recovered or to put into perspective
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Amidst, By, Near, With: Locating Recovery and Forgetting in the Shadow of COVID Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Hosanna Krienke
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Amidst, By, Near, With:Locating Recovery and Forgetting in the Shadow of COVID Hosanna Krienke (bio) Here are some perhaps too-personal questions to ask yourself: Have you stopped wearing a mask? When did you stop? Do you even remember? When was the first time you forgot to wash your hands as soon as you got home? Do you still hold your
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High Rates Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 E. T. Russian, Juliet McMullin, Delight Satter
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: High Rates E. T. Russian (bio), Juliet McMullin (bio), and Delight Satter (bio) [End Page 13] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 14] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 15] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 16] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 17] Click for larger
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Something Is Wrong Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Rachel Fein-Smolinski
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Something Is Wrong Rachel Fein-Smolinski (bio) "Relief from pain through palliative artmaking can save us from the discomfort of living with this injustice and violence that we see every day, but it does not treat the basis for the pain. […] Is the artist perhaps unconsciously at first trying to fight inevitable death by stacking up the
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Recovering a Literary Legacy: The Life of Delores Phillips Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Delia Steverson
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Recovering a Literary Legacy:The Life of Delores Phillips Delia Steverson (bio) In 2002, after suffering a heart attack, author Delores Phillips miraculously drove herself to a Cleveland hospital. Recovering from complications during her hospitalization, Delores later recalled to her only daughter, Shalana Harris, "Man, I should've died
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Are We Ever Really Recovered? Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Gianna Paniagua
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Are We Ever Really Recovered? Gianna Paniagua (bio) [End Page 51] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 52] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 53] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 54] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 55] Click for larger view View full resolution
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Irrecoverable Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Margarita Saona
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Irrecoverable Margarita Saona (bio) "We'll get you back to that," the cardiologist said with a wide smile, pointing to a photo posted on the wall of my room in the Adult Surgical Heart Unit. It was a picture of me breaking a board with a sidekick from the floor of my karate school. I had suffered what a member of the cardiac team called
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Allegorical Investigations: Autism, Applied Behavioral Analysis, and Medieval Poetry Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Kate Crassons
Abstract: This essay explores the connections between the modern autism intervention Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) and medieval personification allegory to show how literature powerfully enables the work of neurodiversity. Invoking the theory of the language game to investigate the clinical history of ABA, the essay puts the fourteenth-century poet William Langland in dialogue with Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Becoming-Amazon: Femininity, Embodiment, and Sexuality in a Photographic and Digital Breast Cancer Project Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Katja Herges
Abstract: In recent decades, digital and photographic life narratives by women living with breast cancer and mastectomy have gained public visibility. This article examines how a documentary and fashion photography project in contemporary Berlin rethinks normative concepts of femininity, embodiment, and sexuality through the performance of the breast cancer patient as Amazon warrior. Based on feminist
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Seeing Horror through the Lens of Health: Embodying Dissociative Identity Disorder in The Babadook Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Paul Mitchell
Abstract: This essay analyzes the representation of dissociative identity disorder in Jennifer Kent's debut feature, The Babadook (2014). Although the film's exploration of psychological themes such as maternal ambivalence, grief, and repression have already been widely discussed in the critical literature, I argue that such readings tend to mitigate the embodied nature of the suffering that Kent's
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Better Medicine: Shared Suffering and Chronic Vulnerability in Brian Teare's The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Tana Jean Welch
Abstract: A posthumanist understanding of the body does not view "illness" and "health" as properties of the individual body, but as emergent features of the relationships between bodies. As such, a relational view of health opens up avenues for the betterment of both human bodies and their social and physical environments. Drawing on posthumanism and the ethics of vulnerability, this article demonstrates
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Paraphrasing Finitude: Seeking Refuge from Death in Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Madalina Meirosu
Abstract: Thomas Bernhard's novella Wittgenstein's Nephew is typically read as a quasi-memoir about Bernhard's relationship with Paul Wittgenstein, the nephew of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. But Bernhard is up to something else. The novella dramatizes the different ways that language and storytelling defend against anxieties associated with illness and mortality. Bernhard is able to show this
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Diagnosing Desire: Imaginative Experiments with Sexuality and the Nerves Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Ira Halpern
Abstract: American fiction often tells us that there is something sick about romantic desire. But the writers who I discuss in this article told their readers this even as they critiqued the medical profession's pathologization of women's desires and non-normative sexual subjectivities. In particular, this article looks at two literary responses to the medical notion that marriage was a cure for hysteria
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Prairie Madness: Mental Illness and Norwegian Immigration to North America in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Virginia Langum
Abstract: In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was widespread concern about the fate of immigrants to the United States. One area of particular concern was mentally ill immigrants, as illustrated in contemporaneous screening procedures, asylum reports, government commissions, popular media, fiction, and scientific studies. This article examines the depiction of one mentally ill immigrant
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Contagion and the Body Politic: De Quincey on the 1830 Revolution in France Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Roxanne Covelo
Abstract: Writing in the fall of 1830, in the period immediately following France's révolution de juillet, Thomas De Quincey predicts the imminent breakdown of social order in Britain. In his political writing for Blackwood's Magazine over the course of this period, he consistently frames the threat of French-style revolution in terms of the body politic and its vulnerability to contagion, often playing
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The Case of the Peculiar Story: Medical Investigation and the Detective in Edgar Allan Poe and Marguerite Duras Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Iro Filippaki, Lakshmi Krishnan
Abstract: In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), Poe invents the detective story in English, introducing his gentleman sleuth Auguste Dupin as he solves the locked-room mystery of two women found brutally murdered in a Paris apartment. In L'Amante Anglaise (1967), Duras revisits the detective form, fictionalizing the true 1949 crime of a woman murdering and dismembering her cousin in Viorne, France
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Contributors Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-11-09
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Roxanne Covelo holds a PhD in Modern Literature from the University of Minas Gerais and a Master's in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. Her research on nineteenth-century journalists and essayists like Thomas De Quincey can be found in Studies in Romanticism, Comparative Literature Studies, the Journal
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Editor's Foreword Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Michael Blackie
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Editor's Foreword Michael Blackie To celebrate Literature and Medicine's 40th anniversary, I asked four previous Executive Editors, all of whom remain actively involved with the journal, to reflect on their experiences. Anne Hudson Jones's piece, "Literature and Medicine: The First Decade," provides a detailed account of the journal's
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Literature and Medicine: The First Decade Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Anne Hudson Jones
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Literature and Medicine:The First Decade Anne Hudson Jones (bio) The first volume of Literature and Medicine, which appeared forty years ago in 1982, offers many answers to the important question, Why? Why did the unusual conjunction of these two disciplines merit starting a journal? Equally important at the time was the question, How
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Literature and Medicine 2000–2007 Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Maura Spiegel, Rita Charon
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Literature and Medicine 2000–2007 Maura Spiegel (bio) and Rita Charon (bio) Our co-editorial retrospect on Literature and Medicine from 2000 to 2007 exposes major conceptual and disciplinary breakthroughs that, at the time, were of course invisible. We can see now how significant a role L&M played in the emergence and development of the
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Communicable (Literature and Medicine 2013–2018) Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Catherine Belling
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Communicable (Literature and Medicine 2013–2018) Catherine Belling (bio) I find my present position here in 2022 a strange one from which to think back on my time editing Literature and Medicine from 2013 to 2018, years both catastrophic and oddly empty. I must now read the issues I edited through the intervening retrospective lens of
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2020 and Beyond Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Michael Blackie, MK Czerwiec
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: 2020 and Beyond Michael Blackie and MK Czerwiec (bio) When this issue goes to print, I will have been Executive Editor of Literature and Medicine for three years. My tenure began in January 2020, two months before lockdown. Although time during the pandemic's first year lacked clear punctuation, with days becoming weeks and weeks becoming
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Apprehensions of a Canon: Literature and Medicine 2013–2022 Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Anna Fenton-Hathaway
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Apprehensions of a Canon:Literature and Medicine 2013–2022 Anna Fenton-Hathaway (bio) Space, through translation, connects, whereas time, through the canon, divides. —Marta Arnaldi, early draft of "Illness as a Foreign Tongue" The claim in the epigraph is meant to be experienced by readers in a certain mood. Lyrical and nervy, it withholds
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An Editorial Philosophy of Book Reviews Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Travis Chi Wing Lau
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: An Editorial Philosophy of Book Reviews Travis Chi Wing Lau (bio) I have always had a strange attachment to the scholarly book review. It was one of the first forms of academic writing I learned to do in graduate school and one of the very first publication opportunities for me as a graduate student. In contrast to the argumentative, evidential
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Reading Wharton with Pain: On Rest, Practices, and Care Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Shari Goldberg
Abstract: Critics have widely regarded Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep (1927) as an ironic novel about pain: a satire of modern life's supposed promise that pain can be avoided. This essay argues that Wharton's novel is as much about managing pain as it is about avoiding it. I consider the novel in light of experiences of chronic pain and illness, both Wharton's and my own. My analysis finds that while
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Humane Animals: Moral Treatment and the Non-Human at York Retreat Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Matthew McConkey
Abstract: This article sheds new light on the human-animal binary in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century psychiatry by considering the therapeutic uses of non-human animals during the early years of the York Retreat (1796–1813). By considering both figurative and "real" uses of non-human animals at the Retreat, I demonstrate how the figure of the animal in institutional discourse shifted towards
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Illness as a Foreign Tongue: Therapeutic Translation in Contemporary Italian Women's Poetry Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Marta Arnaldi
Abstract: This article puts translation on the center stage of second-wave medical humanities. It argues that translation is a way to describe medical discourse in its complexities, from the patient-doctor exchange to the patients' account of their illness, and from instances of medical (mis)communication to the lack thereof (untranslatability). After introducing the notion of therapeutic translation
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Shame, Guilt, and Medical Error in Ann Patchett's State of Wonder Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Luna Dolezal, Arthur Rose
Abstract: Through exploring the relation between shame, guilt, and medical error in Ann Patchett's novel State of Wonder alongside author-physician Danielle Ofri's autobiographical reflections in her essay "Ashamed to Admit It: Owning up to Medical Error," this essay considers how fiction and medical nonfiction might contribute to an understanding of the experience of medical error and being a "second
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"It Is No Small Presumption to Dismember the Image of God": Early Modern Leg Amputation on the Barber-Surgeon's Table and the Dramatist's Page Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Giulia Mari
Abstract: Using the multiple versions of Doctor Faustus's fraudulent leg removal presented in texts A and B of Christopher Marlowe's tragedy, along with The English Faust Book (a source text for Marlowe), and examining an extensive number of early modern surgical manuals, this essay discusses leg amputation in the early modern period. As well as attempting to understand the circumstances that would
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Sensation Fiction, Sexual Health, and Medical Prose: John Milner Fothergill and the Late Victorian Novel Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Doug Battersby
Abstract: This essay examines how cultural anxieties about the impact of novels on mental and physical health sparked by the sensation novel permeated late Victorian medical discourse, focusing on the prominent physician and novelist, John Milner Fothergill (1841–1888). I argue, firstly, that the articulation of these anxieties in medical writing was shaped by contemporary attitudes towards women and
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"On These Little Islands, These Things Happen": Leprosy, Race, and Postcolonial Fictions of Chacachacare Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21 Bassam Sidiki
Abstract: Closely reading and historicizing three contemporary postcolonial fictions about the Chacachacare leper colony in Trinidad, this essay makes the case for more sustained attention to race, colonialism, and infectious disease in disability studies. Employing the concepts of hybridity and encamped ethnicity, the essay shows that leprosy was racialized in the Caribbean context among the Black
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Contributors Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2023-03-21
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Contributors Marta Arnaldi is Lecturer in Italian at St. Anne's College, University of Oxford, and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages/Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education, University of Oslo. After completing her doctorate at Oxford, she was a Laming Research Fellow and Extraordinary
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Editor's Foreword Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Michael Blackie
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Editor's Foreword Michael Blackie With this issue, Literature and Medicine celebrates its 40th anniversary! To mark the occasion, the journal's cover is for the first time white. For readers, like me, who still read the printed edition and who have a bookshelf lined with past volumes, each one saturated with its unique color, this change
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Note on Front Matter Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Michael Blackie
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Note on Front Matter Michael Blackie The amount of health care-related waste generated by the Covid-19 pandemic is staggering. A February 2022 World Health Organization news release estimates that through just one of its global response initiatives some "87,000 tonnes of personal protective equipment . . . was procured between March 2020
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No Space for Trash from Aliens Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Cathy Choi
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: No Space for Trash from Aliens Cathy Choi (bio) [End Page 5] [End Page 6] [End Page 7] [End Page 8] [End Page 9] [End Page 10] [End Page 11] [End Page 12] [End Page 13] [End Page 14] [End Page 15] [End Page 16] [End Page 17] Cathy Choi Cathy Choi is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is pursuing a Bachelor
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Signals in the Anthropocene Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Adam Dickinson
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Signals in the Anthropocene Adam Dickinson (bio) Anthropogenic pollution is rewriting our climate and the metabolism of our bodies. Chemical, noise, and light pollution, as well as gut microbiomes increasingly tuned to Western diets, have consequences for the hormonal conversations constantly taking place in the endocrine systems of humans
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A Pump Is the Dream of Starting Over, and: Asparagus Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Adam Dickinson
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: A Pump Is the Dream of Starting Over, and: Asparagus Adam Dickinson (bio) A Pump Is the Dream of Starting Over You might have diedbut not here and not herethe water pump summons the wellwith rheumatic recollection I move picturesfrom our trip to the arctic into a waterproof boxthe two of us in raincoats our wrists tapedto keep blackflies
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Things I Find on the Ground Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 KC Councilor
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Things I Find on the Ground KC Councilor (bio) [End Page 25] [End Page 26] [End Page 27] [End Page 28] KC Councilor KC Councilor, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Communication, Media, and Screen Studies Department at Southern Connecticut State University. His book, Between You and Me: Transitional Comics, was published in 2019. You
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Introduction: Hunger and Waste Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Isabelle Meuret
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Introduction:Hunger and Waste Isabelle Meuret (bio) Hunger is a physiological disposition, a quotidian preoccupation, and a metaphor for desire. On another scale, global hunger—leading to malnutrition and starvation—affects hundreds of millions living in poverty-stricken, famine-devastated, and war-ravaged areas.1 As for waste, the dearth
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On Caring through Sharing and Reading When Seeing: Attending to Formal Potentialities of Illness Narratives Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Laureanne Willems
Abstract: What are the formal potentialities of illness narratives across media and writerly modes? And how can a formalist reading within this genre contribute to an understanding of particularly stigmatized illnesses and conditions? This essay considers Julia Lederer's and Carolyn Lazard's semi-autobiographical works on anorexia nervosa and chronic illness, respectively, and approaches them through
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Cut Guts: "Eight Bites" and Loving Fat Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Maggie O'Leary
Abstract: In this essay, I outline the colonial origins of the prevailing beliefs and attitudes towards fatness and current justifications for marginalizing fat bodies. I argue that, because the lineages of anti-fatness are beholden to the violence of colonialism and anti-Blackness, any theorization of fat that relies upon the pathological concept of "obesity" reinforces the imaginative purchase this
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(Un)triggering Anorexia: A Cognitive Literary Analysis of Lia "the Liar" in Wintergirls (2009) Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Rocío Riestra-Camacho
Abstract: The importance of authorial intention has been debated extensively in literary studies. In cognitive literary studies, however, the effects books provoke in readers are of greater relevance. With an unreliable intradiegetic narrator, ambivalent about her denial of hunger, Wintergirls (2009), a US YA anorexia novel, embodies the spiraling network of lies that feeds this condition. This essay
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The Diaries of Besieged Leningraders (1941–1944): Representations of a Mass Famine during World War II Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Sarah Gruszka
Abstract: During the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis and their allies between 1941 and 1944 (one of the most deadliest events of World War II), famine caused hundreds of thousands of deaths among the civilian population. How did people react to malnourishment and its impact on the body and mind? The diaries kept by hundreds of ordinary men and women provide an insight into the intimate perception of
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"Something I Have Created": Breastfeeding and Motherhood Trauma in Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Marie Drews
Abstract: This essay examines the challenge of breastfeeding in Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir, specifically how the process of learning to feed, significant in both her own and her mother's traumatic entrances into motherhood, enables Bui to face the "terrifying thought" that, upon giving birth, "FAMILY is now something [she has] created." By situating her narrative in the context
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Body and Blood: Literary Vampirism at the Intersection of Theological Hunger and Physical Waste Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Madeline Potter
Abstract: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla," and Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles all paint a picture of primeval hunger. But the satiation of this hunger sustains an undead, monstrous existence. Essentially an animated corpse, the vampire embodies what Julia Kristeva has described de facto as waste. The image of the vampire perverts everything that is sacred: signficantly, it reverses
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Is Burnout the New Nostalgia? Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Kim Adams
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Is Burnout the New Nostalgia? Kim Adams (bio) Thomas Dodman. What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. 304 pp. Paperback, $38.00. In January of 2020, I sent an email from the reading room of the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. I had found an
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The Healer's Burden: Stories and Poems of Professional Grief ed. by Melissa Fournier and Gina Pribaz (review) Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Tahneer Oksman
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: The Healer's Burden: Stories and Poems of Professional Grief ed. by Melissa Fournier and Gina Pribaz Tahneer Oksman (bio) Melissa Fournier and Gina Pribaz, editors. The Healer's Burden: Stories and Poems of Professional Grief. Iowa City: University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, 2020. 180 pp. Paperback, $22.00. To whom
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Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction by Kylee-Anne Hingston, and; Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Clare Walker Gore (review) Literature and Medicine Pub Date : 2022-07-13 Christian Lewis
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by: Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction by Kylee-Anne Hingston, and; Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Clare Walker Gore Christian Lewis (bio) Kylee-Anne Hingston. Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction. Liverpool: