Communicating Pain: Exploring Suffering through Language, Literature and Creative Writing (Routledge Advances in the Medical Humanities) - Softcover

De Montalk, Stephanie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1032570431 ISBN 13: 9781032570433

Publisher: Routledge, 2023

Synopsis

Combining critical research with memoir, essay, poetry and creative biography, this insightful volume sensitively explores the lived experience of chronic pain.

Confronting the language of pain and the paradox of writing about personal pain, Communicating Pain is a personal response to the avoidance, dismissal and isolation experienced by the author after developing intractable pelvic pain in 2003. The volume focuses on pain's infamous resistance to verbal expression, the sense of exile experienced by sufferers and the under-recognised distinction between acute and chronic pain. In doing so, it creates a platform upon which scholarly, imaginative and emotional quotients round out pain as the sum of physical actualities, mental challenges and psychosocial interactions. Additionally, this work creates a dialogue between medicine and literature. Considering the works of writers such as Harriet Martineau, Alphonse Daudet and Aleksander Wat, it enables a multi-genre narrative heightened by poetry, fictional storytelling and life-writing.

Coupled with academic rigour, this insightful monograph constitutes a persuasive and unique exploration of pain and the communication of suffering. It will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Medical Humanities, Autobiography Studies and Sociology of Health and Illness.

About this title

About the Author

Stephanie de Montalk worked as a nurse and documentary film maker before becoming a writer in 1996. She is the author of four collections of poems, a literary novel, a memoir-biography and the award-winning memoir-study of pain: How Does It Hurt?; adapted from her PhD thesis in Creative Writing. Since an accident in 2003, she has been constrained by pain.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1032570431
• ISBN 13: 9781032570433
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 262