Overview

The First World War gave new and vital impetus to the ancient idea that books could heal. This interdisciplinary collection provides a targeted survey of 100 years of historical and contemporary understandings and practices of ‘the book as cure’. The contributors explore the curative practices of wartime reading, how they were developed and institutionalized after the war, and the afterlives of these ideas and practices today. Divided into three sections, the first considers bibliotherapy in World War I.’ It is rooted in the wartime cultures which ensured bibliotherapy became part of the active treatment of soldiers’ damaged minds and bodies on both sides of the Atlantic after 1914. Parts two and three examine the expanding variety of critical contexts, both historical and more modern, in which reading and wellbeing continued to intersect. The chapters draw on a wide range of source material from trench magazines to autograph books to e-novels, as well as on data and information drawn from practice-based encounters. They also provide the basis for further scholarly exploration of, for example, national traditions and contexts and the inter-disciplinary relationships which they inspire. A Hundred Years of Bibliotherapy: Healing through Books provides the first interdisciplinary dialogue on and account of bibliotherapy, addressing both historical and present-day modes of engaging with the ostensibly curative power of reading and reading cultures. It is an invaluable resource for scholars of literary studies, book history, and the medical humanities.

Full Product Details

Author:   Siobhan Campbell ,  Sara Haslam ,  Edmund G. C. King
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.700kg
ISBN:  

9781032749297

ISBN 10:   1032749296
Pages:   278
Publication Date:   16 May 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Healing through Books: An Introduction; Part I: Bibliotherapy and the First World War; 1. The Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Therapeutic Reading in the First World War Hospital; 2. Galsworthy’s First World War Writing as Self-Care; 3. The American Library Association, ‘Bibliotherapy’ and the First World War ; 4. Autograph Books as Alleviation in British First World War Hospitals: A Case Study; 5. Print as Caregiving in Wartime: The Role of Australian First World War Trench and Hospital Magazines; Part II: Institutional Legacies from Libraries to Hospitals, 1919–1950; 6. ‘Return to Normalcy’: American Librarians and Bibliotherapy in the Aftermath of the First World War; 7. Can There Be a Science of Bibliotherapy? Imagining Bibliotherapy and Its Uses in a Modern Hospital; 8. The Curative Value of Reading: Hospital Libraries and Literary Therapeutics in Britain, 1919–1946; Part III: Contemporary Critical Interventions; 9. The Bibliotherapy Novel: Representations of Literary Caregiving and the Crisis of Print Culture, 1919–2019; 10.‘I liked them a lot...but I feel like I don’t know them fully?’: Implications of Recent Research in Immersion and Engagement for Digital Therapeutic Reading;11. Trauma and Literature: Current Bibliotherapeutic Practices and Literary Trauma Studies in Sweden; 12. Hoping Out Loud: Creative Bibliotherapy and Wellbeing Strategies; Index

Reviews

""This fresh and innovative volume critically examines the history of bibliotherapy from the First World War to its modern use in mental health practice. Its chapters by leading scholars draw on rich veins of material from previously unexplored archival sources to contemporary digital texts to provide an interdisciplinary and fascinating survey of ‘the healing book’ and the transformative power of reading."" Dr Jane Potter, Reader in Arts, Oxford Brookes University

Author Information

Siobhan Campbell is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts at The Open University, UK. She researches the theory and applications of social literary practice. She has developed creative writing projects to be used therapeutically and for social reconstruction in pressurised environments, with partners like Combat Stress UK, NHS Trusts, NGOs, UNDP and third-sector organisations. Her publications include The Expressive Life Writing Handbook (with Meg Jensen; 2017). Sara Haslam is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the Open University, UK. A scholar of modernism and First World War literature, her publications include ‘Reading, Trauma and Literary Caregiving 1914-1918: Helen Mary Gaskell and the War Library’ Journal of Medical Humanities (2018), and Life Writing (with Derek Neale; 2008). Edmund G. C. King is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at The Open University, UK. A book historian with a particular focus on the history of reading, he is most recently the co-editor of Memorialising Shakespeare: Commemoration and Collective Identity, 1916–2016 (with Monika Smialkowska; 2021).

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