New Directions in Literature and Medicine Studies

Stephanie M. Hilger

Nov 2017 · Springer

About this ebook

This book is situated in the field of medical humanities, and the articles continue the dialogue between the disciplines of literature and medicine that was initiated in the 1970s and has continued with ebbs and flows since then. Recently, the need to renew that interdisciplinary dialogue between these two fields, which are both concerned with the human condition, has resurfaced in the face of institutional challenges, such as shrinking resources and the disappearance of many spaces devoted to the exchange of ideas between humanists and scientists. This volume presents cutting-edge research by scholars keen on not only maintaining but also enlivening that dialogue. They come from a variety of cultural, academic, and disciplinary backgrounds and their essays are organized in four thematic clusters: pedagogy, the mind-body connection, alterity, and medical practice.

About the author

Stephanie M. Hilger is Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA where she also holds appointments in French, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the European Union Center. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century British, French, and German literature, with a particular interest in interdisciplinary approaches to literature. She is the author of Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790-1805 (2009) and Gender and Genre: German Women Write the French Revolution (2014). She is also the co-editor of The Early History of Embodied Cognition from 1740 to 1920: The “Lebenskraft” Debate and Radical Reality in German Science, Music, and Literature (2015).