The Function of Symptoms in British Literature since Modernism looks at various ways of treating symptoms of psychological disorders in the literature of the long twentieth century. This book shows that literature can, in its questioning of commonly accepted views of this lived experience of psychic symptoms, help engender new theories about the functioning of subjective cases. Modernism emerged at about the same time as Freudian psychoanalysis did and the aim of this book is to also show that to a certain extent, Woolf preceded Freud in her exploration of the symptom and contributed to fashioning another approach that is now more common, especially in writers from the 1990s-onwards.

The Function of Symptoms in British Literature since Modernism looks at various ways of treating symptoms of psychological disorders in the literature of the long twentieth century. This book shows that literature can, in its questioning of commonly accepted views of this lived experience of psychic symptoms, help engender new theories about the functioning of subjective cases. Modernism emerged at about the same time as Freudian psychoanalysis did and the aim of this book is to also show that to a certain extent, Woolf preceded Freud in her exploration of the symptom and contributed to fashioning another approach that is now more common, especially in writers from the 1990s-onwards.

The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 took the lives of between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, and the United States suffered more casualties than in all the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined. Yet despite these catastrophic death tolls, the pandemic faded from historical and cultural memory in the United States and throughout Europe, overshadowed by World War One and the turmoil of the interwar period. In Viral Modernism, Elizabeth Outka reveals the literary and cultural impact of one of the deadliest plagues in history, bringing to light how it shaped canonical works of fiction and poetry. Outka shows how and why the contours of modernism shift when we account for the pandemic’s hidden but widespread presence. She investigates the miasmic manifestations of the pandemic and its spectral dead in interwar Anglo-American literature, uncovering the traces of an outbreak that brought a nonhuman, invisible horror into every community. Viral Modernism examines how literature and culture represented the virus’s deathly fecundity, as writers wrestled with the scope of mass death in the domestic sphere amid fears of wider social collapse. Outka analyzes overt treatments of the pandemic by authors like Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Wolfe and its subtle presence in works by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats. She uncovers links to the disease in popular culture, from early zombie resurrection to the resurgence of spiritualism. Viral Modernism brings the pandemic to the center of the era, revealing a vast tragedy that has hidden in plain sight.

T. S. Eliot memorably said that separation of the man who suffers from the mind that creates is the root of good poetry. This book argues that this is wrong. Beginning from Virginia Woolf's 'On Being Ill', it demonstrates that modernism is, on the contrary, invested in physical illness as a subject, method, and stylizing force. Experience of physical ailments, from the fleeting to the fatal, the familiar to the unusual, structures the writing of the modernists, both as sufferers and onlookers. Illness reorients the relation to, and appearance of, the world, making it appear newly strange; it determines the character of human interactions and models of behaviour. As a topic, illness requires new ways of writing and thinking, altered ideas of the subject, and a re-examination of the roles of invalids and carers. This book reads the work five authors, who are also known for their illness, hypochondria, or medical work: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby. It overturns the assumption that illness is a simple obstacle to creativity and instead argues that it is a subject of careful thought and cultural significance.

The use of myth in Modernist literature is a misleadingly familiar theme. Joyce's appropriation of Homer's Odyssey and Eliot's of Frazer's Golden Bough are, like Lawrence's primitivism or Yeats's nationalist folklore, attempts to discover an underlying metaphysic in an increasingly fragmented world. In Literature, Modernism and Myth Michael Bell also examines the relationship of myth and modernism to postmodernism. Myth, Bell shows, is inherently flexible; it was used to justify Pound's totalizing vision of society which eventually descended into fascism, and the liberal, ironic vision of human existence Joyce and Mann expressed. Those theorists who present myth as another form of mystification, a search for false origins, ignore its use by modernists to emphasise the ultimate contingency of all values. This anti-foundational element, Bell claims, enables myth to act as a corrective to the claims of ideological critique. Bell shows how postmodern concerns with political and social responsibility, and the role literature plays in formulating this, have in fact been inherited from modernism.

Recovery, Meaning-Making, and Severe Mental Illness offers practitioners an integrative treatment model that will stimulate and harness their creativity, allowing for the formation of new ideas about wellness in the face of profound suffering. The model, Metacognitive Reflection and Insight Therapy (MERIT), complements current treatment modalities and can be used by practitioners from a broad range of theoretical backgrounds. By using metacognitive capacity as a guide to intervention, MERIT stretches and strengthens practitioners’ capacity for reflection and allows them to better use their unique knowledge to help people who are confronting the suffering and chaos that often comes from psychosis. Clinicians will come away from this book with a variety of tools for helping clients manage their own recovery and confront the issues that accompany an illness-based identity.

The Reader's Guide to Women's Studies is a searching and analytical description of the most prominent and influential works written in the now universal field of women's studies. Some 200 scholars have contributed to the project which adopts a multi-layered approach allowing for comprehensive treatment of its subject matter. Entries range from very broad themes such as "Health: General Works" to entries on specific individuals or more focused topics such as "Doctors."

Adam Parkes investigates the literary and cultural implications of the censorship encountered by several modern novelists in the early twentieth century. He situates modernism in the context of this censorship, examining the relations between such authors as D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, and Virginia Woolf and the public controversies generated by their fictional explorations of modern sexual themes. These authors located "obscenity" at the level of stylistic and formal experiment. The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ulysses, and Orlando dramatized problems of sexuality and expression in ways that subverted the moral, political, and aesthetic premises on which their censors operated. In showing how modernism evolved within a culture of censorship, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship suggests that modern novelists, while shaped by their culture, attempted to reshape it.

Gott examines Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) in conjunction with Gustave Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874). He provides a highly original reading of both texts and argues that a stylistic affinity exists between the two works.

A leading interpreter of modernity argues that our culture of limitless self-fulfillment is making millions mentally ill. Training her analytic eye on manic depression and schizophrenia, Liah Greenfeld, in the culminating volume of her trilogy on nationalism, traces these dysfunctions to society’s overburdening demands for self-realization.