Literary Studies and Human Flourishing

The Humanities and Human Flourishing series publishes edited volumes that explore the role of human flourishing in the central disciplines of the humanities, and whether and how the humanities can increase human happiness. The contributors to this volume of essays investigate the question: what do literary scholars contribute to social scientific research on human happiness and flourishing? Of all humanities disciplines, none is more resistant to the program of positive psychology or the prevailing discourse of human flourishing than literary studies. The approach taken in this volume of essays is neither to gloss over that antagonism nor to launch a series of blasts against positive psychology and the happiness industry. Rather, the contributors reflect on how their literary research--work to which they are personally committed--might become part of an interdisciplinary conversation about human flourishing. The contributors' areas of research are wide ranging, covering literary aesthetics, book history, digital humanities, and reader reception, as well as the important "inter-disciplines" of gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and black studies-fields in which issues of stigma and exclusion are paramount, and which have critiqued the discourse of human flourishing for its failure to grapple with structural inequality and human difference. Literary scholars are drawn more readily to the problematic than to the decidable, but by dwelling on the trouble spots in a field of inquiry still largely confined to the sciences, Literary Studies and Human Flourishing provides the groundwork for new and more productive forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange.

James F. English is John Welsh Centennial Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and founding Faculty Director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. His main fields of research are the sociology and economics of culture; the history of literary studies as a discipline; and contemporary British fiction, film, and tele­vision. His books include Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (1994), The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005), and The Global Future of English Studies (2012). He is currently studying the history of rating and ranking systems in the arts. Heather Love teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin ("Rethinking Sex"), and the coeditor of a special issue of Representations ("Description across Disciplines"). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, the ethics of observation, spinster aesthetics, reading methods in literary studies, and the figure of the tragic lesbian. Her most recent book, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory, was published in October 2021.

Series Editor's Foreword by James O. Pawelski Introduction by James F. English and Heather Love Part I: Happy Reading: Literature Without the Academy Chapter 1: "Bibliotherapy and Human Flourishing" Leah Price Chapter 2: "Bad Habits on Goodreads? Eclecticism vs Genre-Intolerance among Online Readers" James F. English, Scott Enderle, and Rahul Dhakecha Part II: Flourishing Beyond Reason: Literature's Augmented Realities Chapter 3: "Flourishing Spirits" Chris Castiglia Chapter 4: "Sage Writing: Facing Reality in Literature" David Russell Part III: Flourishing in Crisis: The Poetics of Disaster Chapter 5: "Literature of Uplift" David James Chapter 6: "Black Ecological Optimism and the Problem of Human Flourishing" Sonya Posmentier Part IV: Non-Normative Flourishing: Disability and Aging Chapter 7: "Literary Study, the Hermeneutics of Disability, and the Eudaimonic Turn" Janet Lyon Chapter 8: "Wise Old Fools: Positive Geropsychology and the Poetics of Later-Life Floundering" Scott Herring Part V: Positive Affect: Redescription and Repair Chapter 9: "Therapeutic Redescription" Beth Blum Chapter 10: "Merely Ameliorative: Reading, Critical Affect, and the Project of Repair" Heather Love