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 and the founding director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. 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 best-known book is The Economy of Prestige, a study of the history, functions, and effects of prizes in literature and the arts. The Global Future of English Studies was published in 2012 in the Blackwell Manifesto series. His current book project is Beauty by the Numbers, a history of rating and ranking systems in literature and the arts.

Heather Love teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory and Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Additionally, she is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin ("Rethinking Sex"), and the co-editor 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, and reading methods in literary studies.

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