Narrating Illness: Prospects and Constraints

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. Telling the story of illness emerges from a landscape of pain, grief and loss, but its therapeutic value is indubitable. This volume grapples with the potentials and limitations of such narratives as diverse cultural perceptions and realities are granted the voice to probe into those stories from literary and textual material, as well as empirical, ethnographic, historical, and personal bases. Some of the chapters draw upon the capacity of storytelling to heal bodies and souls, whereas others provide an important corrective to this overwhelmingly optimistic portrayal by focusing on the limits of storytelling and narrative to address physical and psychic trauma. Despite the different approaches, what ties these chapters together is a more focused textual and contextual analysis of the intersection between forms of storytelling and sharing the experience of illness as studied and witnessed and sometimes even lived by the authors of the volume.