Anne Whitehead

Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction

A Critical Intervention in Medical Humanities

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

*APPROVED* Offers a new understanding of empathy and its relation to medicine and literature This book marks a critical intervention in the medical humanities that takes issue with its understanding of empathy as something that one has. Drawing on phenomenology and feminist affect theory, it positions empathy as something that one does and that is embedded within structural, institutional, and cultural relations of power. More than this, it questions the assumption that empathy is limited to the clinical relation, thinking about medicine as more broadly defined. Combining theoretical argument with literary case studies of books by Mark Haddon, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Aminatta Forna and Kazuo Ishiguro, this book also contends that contemporary fiction is not a vehicle for accessing another's illness experience, but is itself engaging critically with the question of empathy and its limits. Anne Whitehead is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University. She is the author of Trauma Fiction (2004) and Memory: New Critical Idiom (2009).

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Edinburgh University Press
• Seitenzahl: 224
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. Oktober 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 239mm x 155mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 499g
• ISBN-13: 9780748686186
• ISBN-10: 0748686185
• Artikelnr.: 43611522

Autorenporträt

Anne Whitehead is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University, UK. She is the author of Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh, 2004) and Memory: New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 2009). She has co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh, 2016), Theories of Memory: A Reader (Edinburgh, 2007) and W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (Edinburgh, 2004), as well as a special issue of Feminist Theory on feminism and affect. She has published articles on contemporary literature in a range of journals, including Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and Contemporary Literature.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction 5
1. Empathy and Mind 37
2. Empathy and Ethics 79
3. Empathy and Interdisciplinarity 121
4. Empathy and the Geopolitical 163
5. Empathy and Capitalism 202
Conclusion