A Hundred Years of Bibliotherapy Healing through Books

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Healing through Books: An Introduction

Edmund G. C. King, Sara Haslam, and Siobhan Campbell

Part I: Bibliotherapy and the First World War  

1. The Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Therapeutic Reading in the First World War Hospital

Laura Gray Blair 

2. Galsworthy’s First World War Writing as Self-Care 

Helen Chambers

3. The American Library Association, ‘Bibliotherapy’ and the First World War 

Vincent Trott

4. Autograph Books as Alleviation in British First World War Hospitals: A Case Study

Lindsay Davies

5. Print as Caregiving in Wartime: The Role of Australian First World War Trench and Hospital Magazines 

Véronique Duché and Amanda Laugesen  

Part II: Institutional Legacies from Libraries to Hospitals, 1919–1950 

6. ‘Return to Normalcy’: American Librarians and Bibliotherapy in the Aftermath of the First World War

Barbara Hochman

7. Can There Be a Science of Bibliotherapy? Imagining Bibliotherapy and Its Uses in a Modern Hospital

Mary Mahoney

8. The Curative Value of Reading: Hospital Libraries and Literary Therapeutics in Britain, 1919–1946

Edmund G. C. King

Part III: Contemporary Critical Interventions  

9. The Bibliotherapy Novel: Representations of Literary Caregiving and the Crisis of Print Culture, 1919–2019

Jesse Miller

10.‘I liked them a lot...but I feel like I don’t know them fully?’: Implications of Recent Research in Immersion and Engagement for Digital Therapeutic Reading

Laura Dietz

11. Trauma and Literature: Current Bibliotherapeutic Practices and Literary Trauma Studies in Sweden

Katarina Båth

12. Hoping Out Loud: Creative Bibliotherapy and Wellbeing Strategies 

Danni Glover 

Index

Biography

Siobhan Campbell is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts at The Open University, UK. She researches the theory and applications of social literary practice. She has developed creative writing projects to be used therapeutically and for social reconstruction in pressurised environments, with partners like Combat Stress UK, NHS Trusts, NGOs, UNDP and third-sector organisations. Her publications include The Expressive Life Writing Handbook (with Meg Jensen; 2017).

Sara Haslam is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at the Open University, UK. A scholar of modernism and First World War literature, her publications include ‘Reading, Trauma and Literary Caregiving 1914-1918: Helen Mary Gaskell and the War Library’ Journal of Medical Humanities (2018), and Life Writing (with Derek Neale; 2008).

Edmund G. C. King is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at The Open University, UK. A book historian with a particular focus on the history of reading, he is most recently the co-editor of Memorialising Shakespeare: Commemoration and Collective Identity, 1916–2016 (with Monika Smialkowska; 2021).

"This fresh and innovative volume critically examines the history of bibliotherapy from the First World War to its modern use in mental health practice. Its chapters by leading scholars draw on rich veins of material from previously unexplored archival sources to contemporary digital texts to provide an interdisciplinary and fascinating survey of ‘the healing book’ and the transformative power of reading."

Dr Jane Potter, Reader in Arts, Oxford Brookes University