The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer: On Writing Illnesses and Illnesses in Writing

A vital new collection of essays, The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer investigates how literature represents and also shapes the experiences of illness, pain, sensation, and suffering. Drawing on scholars from across the globe, the collection moves deftly among periods, texts, perspectives, and locations to offer a capacious critical mapping of literary pathography.

Elizabeth Outka, University of Richmond

Author of Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (Columbia UP, 2019)

The volume of essays offers a broad literary landscape to get to the heart of the difference between illness and disease. The essays cover an interesting range of writers and genres from around the world to explore the poetics and ethics of illness. Novels, short stories, plays, poems, both canonical and non-canonical, allow the volume to encompass an interesting corpus that will help provide an engaging and timely intervention in the growing field of literature and medicine.

Prof. Sangeeta Ray

University of Maryland

Registering illness as a critical factor that shapes human society— not just as a technocratic or medical issue, but as one that also merits literary and cultural investigation, this compelling and cogently argued volume succeeds in bringing together different encounters between illness and literature across time and space. It is a timely contribution that will be of great interest to scholars in humanities across the globe.

Prof. Priya Menon

Troy University