Literature and Medicine for the 2016 ESSE conference
Galway, 22nd – 26th August (further details at http://www.esse2016.org/)

In her 1930 essay ‘On Being Ill’ Woolf noted how “strange” it was “that illness ha[d] not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” Does Woolf’s comment still hold? A number of scholars have recently explored the symbolic value of illness in literature but how far can or should literature go beyond metaphor in representing the experience of illness? How far does Rita Charon’s concept of ‘narrative medicine’ capture the distinctiveness of literature as an alternative to medical discourse? We invite papers on the interconnections between literature and medical discourse in 20th and 21st century British literature.

Convenors
Dr. Nicolas Pierre Boileau EA853, LERMA
Faculté des lettres, Université d’Aix-Marseille
29 avenue R. Schuman 13161 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 1 France
nicolas.boileau@univ-amu.fr<mailto:nicolas.boileau@univ-amu.fr>

Professor Clare Hanson
Faculty of Humanities, University of Southampton
Avenue Campus Highfield
 Southampton SO17 1BJ 
United Kingdom
C.Hanson@soton.ac.uk<mailto:C.Hanson@soton.ac.uk>

Deadline for submission of abstracts 31 March 2016

Clare Hanson
Professor of Twentieth Century Literature
School of Humanities: English
University of Southampton
Southampton SO17 1BF
c.hanson@soton.ac.uk
023 8059 2470