Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction

Offers a new understanding of empathy and its relation to medicine and literature, as a critical intervention into the medical humanitiesThis book marks a critical intervention in the medical humanities that takes issue with its understanding of empathy as something that one has. Drawing on phenomenology and feminist affect theory, it positions empathy as something that one does and that is embedded within structural, institutional, and cultural relations of power. More than this, it questions the assumption that empathy is limited to the clinical relation, thinking about medicine as more broadly defined. Combining theoretical argument with literary case studies of books by Mark Haddon, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Aminatta Forna and Kazuo Ishiguro, this book also contends that contemporary fiction is not a vehicle for accessing another’s illness experience, but is itself engaging critically with the question of empathy and its limits.Key FeaturesProvides a strong conceptual underpinning for the notion of empathy, drawing on phenomenology and feminist affect theoryRelates the idea of empathy not only to the clinical relation but also to medicine more broadly definedRepositions literature’s role in the medical humanities from a vehicle to access patient experience to a strategic intervention into current debates on empathy and its effects

Anne Whitehead is Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University, UK. She is the author of Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh, 2004) and Memory: New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 2009). She has co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities (Edinburgh, 2016), Theories of Memory: A Reader (Edinburgh, 2007) and W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (Edinburgh, 2004), as well as a special issue of Feminist Theory on feminism and affect. She has published articles on contemporary literature in a range of journals, including Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, and Contemporary Literature.