Writing Contested Illness: Experimentation in Contemporary Women's Life Writing (Contemporary Cultural Studies in Illness, Health and Medicine) - Hardcover

Green, Chloe R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1399534408 ISBN 13: 9781399534406

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2025

Synopsis

Intervening in the gnarled lineage of gender, genre and medicine, Writing Contested Illness investigates how uncertainty, doubt and dismissal, the key features of medical contestation, are mediated and transformed in women’s experimental illness narratives. It discusses how a range of autobiographical experimentation in emerging and increasingly common subgenres like autofiction, autotheory, experimental memoir and the lyric essay, are creating productive new avenues for contested illnesses to be represented. These illnesses, which range in this book across hysteria, eating disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and chronic Lyme disease, have been subject to constrictive medical practices, rendering the conditions illegitimate, under-studied and under-diagnosed. In observing how such narratives identify the rifts caused by medicalised contestation and identify key sites of repair within this sphere, this book argues that experimental life writing can be its own first-hand, affective and embodied source of medical knowledge.

About this title

About the Author

Chloe R. Green is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. She has published widely on the medical humanities, life writing, autofiction and affect theory, and was previously an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin.

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1399534408
• ISBN 13: 9781399534406
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 220