Overview

This volume explores the myriad interactions between American literature and psychological discourses in the United States, from self-help to alternative health practices to psychotherapeutic approaches. Spanning the 1940s to the 2020s, it sheds light on the development and conceptualization of therapeutic culture during a century in which it has oscillated between clinical and cultural domains. Bringing together an intergenerational group of scholars from France, the UK and the US, the collection examines authors as varied as William Carlos Williams, Lionel Trilling, Sylvia Plath, Philip Roth, Colson Whitehead, Daniel Suarez and Ottessa Moshfegh. Moving beyond the conventional focus on psychoanalysis, the eleven contributors foreground how American literature is animated by broader therapeutic modes and trajectories. At stake are not only literature's historical links to psychological theories and institutions, but the neoliberal framing of literary texts as tools for personal restoration.

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9781399551328

Table of Contents

Reviews

This dynamic collection offers a kaleidoscope analysis of American literature and therapeutic culture from the early twentieth century to the present day. Moving beyond familiar psychoanalytic accounts of the emergence of the modern self, it brings to the fore the pluralistic, everyday and often eccentric therapeutic coping mechanisms pursued by major American authors and laypeople alike. A superb synthesis of the state of therapeutic scholarship today, this volume is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the rich literary prehistory of our own therapeutic times. -- Beth Blum, Harvard University Who wouldn’t long for literature to supply repair in an age of interminable calamity? This authoritative volume invites us to historicise that longing, asking us to think again before idealising literature’s curative utility. By foregrounding the mutual imbrication of American writing and therapeutic cultures, it offers a vital resource for resituating the socio-affective valences of literature from the early twentieth century onwards – giving renewed primacy to the collective over the individual, while being unafraid to encompass literature’s complicities as much as its possibilities. From William Carlos Williams to Colson Whitehead, from postwar poetry to contemporary autofiction, American Literature and Therapeutic Cultures offers an essential guide to the creative, institutional and intellectual terrains that have contested as much as fostered the reparative capacities of, and enduring hopes for, the experience of literature in an unravelling world. -- David James, University of Birmingham

This dynamic collection offers a kaleidoscope analysis of American literature and therapeutic culture from the early twentieth century to the present day. Moving beyond familiar psychoanalytic accounts of the emergence of the modern self, it brings to the fore the pluralistic, everyday and often eccentric therapeutic coping mechanisms pursued by major American authors and laypeople alike. A superb synthesis of the state of therapeutic scholarship today, this volume is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the rich literary prehistory of our own therapeutic times.--Beth Blum, Harvard University Who wouldn't long for literature to supply repair in an age of interminable calamity? This authoritative volume invites us to historicise that longing, asking us to think again before idealising literature's curative utility. By foregrounding the mutual imbrication of American writing and therapeutic cultures, it offers a vital resource for resituating the socio-affective valences of literature from the early twentieth century onwards - giving renewed primacy to the collective over the individual, while being unafraid to encompass literature's complicities as much as its possibilities. From William Carlos Williams to Colson Whitehead, from postwar poetry to contemporary autofiction, American Literature and Therapeutic Cultures offers an essential guide to the creative, institutional and intellectual terrains that have contested as much as fostered the reparative capacities of, and enduring hopes for, the experience of literature in an unravelling world.--David James, University of Birmingham

Author Information

Nicholas Manning is Professor of American Literature at Université Grenoble Alpes and a fellow of the Institut universitaire de France. His most recent monograph is The Artifice of Affect: American Realist Literature and Emotional Truth (2023). Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Thought and Culture at the University of Leicester. His recent books include The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health (2022) and Transformed States: Medicine, Biotechnology, and American Culture, 1990–2020 (2025).

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