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Davis presents original case-histories of readers to delve into just what reading is and how it works.
Each chapter begins with a poem or excerpt which becomes the scene either of a reading-group transcription or of a thought-piece from an interviewed reader to explore therapeutic reading and how culture might impact upon health.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 No Defence against the Words: A Story of Sonnet 29
- Chapter 2 The Schoolteacher
- Chapter 3 The Woman Who Pointed
- Chapter 4 The Woman Who Became a Poem
- Chapter 5 The Brain of Frances
- Chapter 6 The Doctor
- Chapter 7 Experiments with Renaissance Scripts
- Chapter 8 About Time: Three Little Poems
- Chapter 9 The Novel Experimenter
- Chapter 10 The Anthologist
- Chapter 11 The Novelist
- Afterword
About the author
Philip Davis is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. Reading for Life is an account of the work done by his research unit, the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS) in partnership with outreach charity The Reader since 2008. He is author of works on Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, George Eliot, Bernard Malamud, and on the uses of memory from Wordsworth to Lawrence, and has written various books on literary reading. He is editor of OUP's series The Literary Agenda on the role of literature in the world of the twenty-first century and a new series entitled My Reading.
Summary
Reading for Life is an anthology of poems and of extracts from prose fiction, related to a series of case-histories of individuals carefully reading, discussing their reading lives, and thinking about the relation of literature to their existence. It enables readers to gain increased imaginative access to the works in question through seeing how they have intensely affected equivalent readers—a novelist, a poet, a doctor, a teacher, an anthologist, but also non-specialists, ordinary people within shared reading groups in many different settings, finding help from literary texts in times of often painful personal need. It is the story of the work done by Philip Davis' research unit, the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS), at the University of Liverpool, in a ten-year partnership with the outreach charity The Reader, taking serious literature to often neglected communities and struggling individuals through the shared reading—alive and aloud—of literature from all ages.
Reading for Life is a detailed account of what reading literature can do for a wide variety of individuals in relation to a wide variety of texts: it will be of interest to serious readers in the wider world as much as to scholars working within literary studies, and to all those involved in thinking about the therapeutic interactions of literature and life in psychology, medicine, and mental health support settings.
Additional text
With its extraordinary mix of literature, neuroscience, history, and case studies, this beautifully written book exemplifies the alchemy that can happen when words come to life on the page. Reading can change the trajectory of a life, which changes our society, which propels our future species. Philip Davis shows us why this is so.
