In her 1930 essay 'On Being Ill' Woolf noted how "strange" it was "that illness ha[d] not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature." Does Woolf's comment still hold? A number of scholars have recently explored the symbolic value of illness in literature but how far can or should literature go beyond metaphor in representing the experience of illness? How far does Rita Charon's concept of 'narrative medicine' capture the distinctiveness of literature as an alternative to medical discourse? We invite papers on the interconnections between literature and medical discourse in 20th and 21st century British literature.

See Seminar 79 on the conference website: http://www.esse2016.org/seminars.html