American Literature and Therapeutic Cultures

Nicholas Manning is Professor of American Literature at Université Grenoble Alpes and a fellow of the Institut universitaire de France. His most recent monograph is The Artifice of Affect: American Realist Literature and Emotional Truth (2023). Martin Halliwell is Professor of American Thought and Culture at the University of Leicester. His recent books include The Edinburgh Companion to the Politics of American Health (2022) and Transformed States: Medicine, Biotechnology, and American Culture, 1990–2020 (2025).

• ContributorsIntroduction: American Literature and Therapeutic CulturesNicholas Manning and Martin HalliwellPart I: Late Modernism to Mid-Century1. 'Art was Williams’s Therapy': William Carlos Williams’s Maieutic Process in PatersonSamantha Lemeunier2. Public Displays of Disaffection: Lionel Trilling and the Power of NeurosisTimothy Aubry3. From Resistance to Reconnection: Sylvia Plath Under the Lens of New TherapeuticsAubrey Jones Part II: Literary Legacies of Postwar America4. Curing the Collective? Postwar Experimental and Performance Poetry as Social TherapyCélia Galey5. Diagnosing the Lyric: Therapeutic Cultures and Gender in Postwar American PoetryJuliette Bouanani6. Pathogenic Culture and Therapeutic Discipline in Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys and Black American LiteratureJean-Paul Rocchi Part III: Contemporary Cultural Directions7. Catharsis Unbound: Mythopsychosis in Jerome Charyn’s AutofictionsMichaëla Cogan8. Science Fiction and the Emotional Choreography of Postgenomic Life CulturesMartin Halliwell9. ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’: Vulnerability and Therapeutic Imaginations in Ottessa Moshfegh's Contemporary FictionAlwena Queillé Epilogue: Therapeutic Fictions and Democratic FuturesPeter BoxallGeneral BibliographyIndex

This dynamic collection offers a kaleidoscope analysis of American literature and therapeutic culture from the early twentieth century to the present day. Moving beyond familiar psychoanalytic accounts of the emergence of the modern self, it brings to the fore the pluralistic, everyday and often eccentric therapeutic coping mechanisms pursued by major American authors and laypeople alike. A superb synthesis of the state of therapeutic scholarship today, this volume is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the rich literary prehistory of our own therapeutic times.