Details

Subject(s)

• Conduct of life [Browse]
• Happiness [Browse]
• Literature—Philosophy [Browse]

Editor

• Love, Heather [Browse]
• English, James F., 1958- [Browse]

Series

• Oxford Academic [More in this series]
• Oxford scholarship online

Summary note

Of all humanities disciplines, none is more resistant to the program of positive psychology or more hostile to the prevailing discourse of human flourishing than literary studies. The approach taken in this volume of essays is neither to gloss over that antagonism nor to launch a series of blasts against positive psychology and the happiness industry. Rather, the essays are attempts to reflect on how the kinds of literary research the contributors themselves are doing, the kinds of work to which they are personally committed, might become part of an interdisciplinary conversation about human flourishing. The authors' specific fields of work are wide-ranging, covering literary aesthetics, book history, digital humanities, and reader reception, as well as the important "interdisciplines" of gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and black studies-fields in which issues of stigma and exclusion are paramount, and which have critiqued the discourse of human flourishing for its failure to grapple with structural inequality and human difference. Taken together, the essays contribute more points of ambiguity and hesitation to the study of human flourishing than decisive advancements. Literary scholars are drawn more readily to the problematic than to the decidable. But by dwelling on the trouble spots in a field of inquiry still largely confined to the sciences, this volume provides the groundwork for new and more productive forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange.

Notes

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Source of description

Description based on print version record.

Contents

Contents: List of Illustrations - Series Editor's Foreword - List of Contributors - Introduction: Literary Studies and Human Flourishing - James F. English and Heather Love - Part I:Happy Reading: Literature without the Academy - 1. Bibliotherapy and Human Flourishing - Leah Price - 2. Bad Habits on Goodreads? Eclecticism vs. Genre-Intolerance among Online Readers - James F. English, Scott Enderle, and Rahul Dhakecha - Part II:Flourishing beyond Reason: Literature's Augmented Realities - 3. Flourishing Spirits - Christopher Castiglia - 4. Sage Writing: Facing Reality in Literature - David Russell - Part III:Flourishing in Crisis: The Poetics of Disaster - 5. Literature of Uplift - David James - 6. Black Ecological Optimism and the Problem of Human Flourishing - Sonya Posmentier - Part IV:Non-Normative Flourishing: Disability and Aging - 7. Literary Study, the Hermeneutics of Disability, and the Eudaimonic Turn - Janet Lyon - 8. Wise Old Fools: Positive Geropsychology and the Poetics of Later-Life Floundering - Scott Herring - Part V:Positive Affect: Redescription and Repair - 9. Therapeutic Redescription - Beth Blum - 10. Merely Ameliorative: Reading, Critical Affect, and the Project of Repair - Heather Love - Index

ISBN

• 0-19-763724-8
• 0-19-763726-4

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