Literary Studies and Human Flourishing

This volume, part of the Humanities and Human Flourishing series, asks the question: what do literary scholars contribute to the often science-focused fields related to happiness and flourishing? The essays in this volume reflect on how the kinds of literary research the contributors themselves are doing, the kinds of work to which they are personally committed, might become part of an interdisciplinary conversation about human flourishing.

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