Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in Spanish and European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1960s)

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The Fellowship analyses cultural narratives of ill-health in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing together specialists in Modern Languages, Health and Psychology, the project will trace the development of narratives of illness from 1870s to 1960s, and their legacy in the present day, with particular attention to the gendered representation of psychological and physical conditions. The Fellowship will contribute new understanding of the cultural phenomenon whereby diagnostic terminology is employed to describe communities during periods of upheaval and introspection. Burnout and its antecedents (aboulia, neurasthenia) have contemporary resonance across professional occupations, from health care and academia, to those on zero hours contracts. Defined by WHO as a strictly occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress, the term burnout has been subject to much broader cultural conceptualisation, and is often associated in the press with economic precarity, the 'double shift' of carers, and 24/7 technology. The Fellowship will critique gendered, ideological models of resilience that place unequal responsibility for caring, alongside economic and social health, on particular social groups.A volume of creative writing that explores burnout and mental health, and a blog on medical fiction, will be produced with researchers in the Medical School and Psychology, Exeter. These outputs will be delivered through engagement events for creative writers and health support groups, to co-create research on public health (occupational burnout, mental health and menopause), taking inspiration from interviews with contemporary authors from Spain, Britain and other European countries on narratives of women's health, from maternity to mid-life. The engagement of scholars across Modern Languages, medical researchers and individuals with lived experience will allow methodological, skills and impact development resulting from the critical fusion of professional and personal perspectives.Cultural texts play a vital role in society's understanding of ill-health. Spanish novels of the early twentieth century (by Unamuno, Azorin, Baroja) are populated by characters defined by the ubiquitous apathy that was perceived to be afflicting the nation. The Fellowship explores the ways in which cultural narratives that depict widespread psychological and physiological conditions may be read as responses to social, economic and political circumstances. During times of uncertainty and crisis, legitimising narratives about ill-health thereby interact ideologically with creative responses to wider socio-economic phenomena. The project seeks to understand and illuminate two distinct areas: firstly, the lived experience of illness as expressed by literary narratives; and secondly the construction of metaphors by which political and cultural texts appropriate scientific language to produce ideologically-driven meaning. The comparative approach to studying cultures across national boundaries supports research outcomes that have transformative potential for Medical Humanities research in Modern Languages disciplines, supporting methodological development in these fields through collaborative scholarship and mentoring of a Research Assistant. The Principal Investigator's book, Bodies of Disorder (2017), analyses degenerationist models across national borders. Extending this work, the project gathers a network of scholars across Modern Languages (Hispanic, French, Italian, German), History and English to provide a comparative, transnational forum for the study of cultural representations of sickness across early twentieth-century and post-war Europe. The Fellowship will facilitate collaboration between researchers to shape academic contributions for an edited collection of new scholarship on representations of ill-health in modern European literary texts, and a monograph on narratives of illness in Spanish post-war fiction.