Josie Billington: Literary Reading and Mental Health
GUEST LECTURE
Publishers are currently enjoying a healthy trade in telling us that literature is good for our mental health. Books abound which extol the virtues of fiction and poetry to heal stress, panic, or grief. These trade titles popularise for contemporary readers an idea of literature as a form of life-support which is by no means new. Indeed, the association of reading with human flourishing has a history almost as long as that of reading itself. Over the last few decades in particular, the practice and study of the therapeutic properties of literary reading has become more formalized and systematic than ever before with illuminating results.
But what does it mean to say that a novel or a poem can help a person who is suffering or in need? How and why does literature work in this way? Is it right to regard literary reading as a form of therapy or is this the wrong language and paradigm for understanding literature’s power?
In this lecture, I will explore some of these questions by drawing on empirical research conducted in collaboration with colleagues from a range of disciplines, including medicine, psychology and clinical practice. Together, we have studied the value of shared group reading for people living with chronic mental health conditions, using multi-dimensional methodologies to capture the quality of individual moments of reading, as well as reading’s power to produce change over time. Through very specific UK examples, I will address the matter of what is to be gained or lost in harnessing literature to the therapeutic sciences and/or annexing literary reading to mental health care provision.
About Josie Billington
Josie Billington is Professor in English at the University of Liverpool, specialising in Victorian Literature and in literary reading and mental health.
She has published widely, as editor and critic, on nineteenth-century literary realism and on Victorian women’s fiction and poetry. Her publications include The Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (ed., Vol 10, Pickering & Chatto, 2006), This is Living Art: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2012), George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (ed., Oxford University Press, 2015), Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant (ed., Vols 10 & 24, Taylor and Francis, 2012, 2017), as well as critical works on Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley and Leo Tolstoy.
Over the last decade, she has led a range of interdisciplinary research projects with colleagues in Medicine and Psychology, in partnership with UK charity The Reader and health partners, regionally, nationally and internationally. This work has culminated in a monograph, Is Literature Healthy? (Oxford University Press, 2016) and an edited volume, Reading and Mental Health (Palgrave, 2019), as well as numerous articles and chapters including, most recently, contributions to the Edinburgh History of Reading (2020) and the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis (2021).
Professor Billington is Research Impact Lead for the School of the Arts and co-leads the Arts, Mental Health and Wellbeing theme of the Centre for Medical, Health and Environmental Humanities at Liverpool. She is also co-Director of a new Masters in Health, Cultures and Societies. She is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College, a Higher Education Academy National Teaching Fellow, and (currently) Vice-President of t
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