A Hundred Years of Bibliotherapy: Healing through Books

The First World War gave new and vital impetus to the ancient idea that books could heal. This interdisciplinary collection provides a targeted survey of 100 years of historical and contemporary understandings and practices of ‘the book as cure’.

The contributors explore the curative practices of wartime reading, how they were developed and institutionalized after the war, and the afterlives of these ideas and practices today. Divided into three sections, the first considers bibliotherapy in World War I.’ It is rooted in the wartime cultures which ensured bibliotherapy became part of the active treatment of soldiers’ damaged minds and bodies on both sides of the Atlantic after 1914. Parts two and three examine the expanding variety of critical contexts, both historical and more modern, in which reading and wellbeing continued to intersect. The chapters draw on a wide range of source material from trench magazines to autograph books to e-novels, as well as on data and information drawn from practice-based encounters. They also provide the basis for further scholarly exploration of, for example, national traditions and contexts and the inter-disciplinary relationships which they inspire.

A Hundred Years of Bibliotherapy: Healing through Books provides the first interdisciplinary dialogue on and account of bibliotherapy, addressing both historical and present-day modes of engaging with the ostensibly curative power of reading and reading cultures. It is an invaluable resource for scholars of literary studies, book history, and the medical humanities.

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).