Literary Studies and Human Flourishing

James F. English is John Welsh Centennial Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and founding Faculty Director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. His main fields of research are the sociology and economics of culture; the history of literary studies as a discipline; and contemporary British fiction, film, and tele­vision. His books include Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (1994), The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005), and The Global Future of English Studies (2012). He is currently studying the history of rating and ranking systems in the arts.Heather Love teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin ("Rethinking Sex"), and the coeditor of a special issue of Representations ("Description across Disciplines"). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, the ethics of observation, spinster aesthetics, reading methods in literary studies, and the figure of the tragic lesbian. Her most recent book, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory, was published in October 2021.

• Series Editor's Foreword by James O. PawelskiIntroduction by James F. English and Heather Love Part I: Happy Reading: Literature Without the AcademyChapter 1: "Bibliotherapy and Human Flourishing"Leah PriceChapter 2: "Bad Habits on Goodreads? Eclecticism vs Genre-Intolerance among Online Readers"James F. English, Scott Enderle, and Rahul DhakechaPart II: Flourishing Beyond Reason: Literature's Augmented RealitiesChapter 3: "Flourishing Spirits"Chris CastigliaChapter 4: "Sage Writing: Facing Reality in Literature"David RussellPart III: Flourishing in Crisis: The Poetics of DisasterChapter 5: "Literature of Uplift"David JamesChapter 6: "Black Ecological Optimism and the Problem of Human Flourishing"Sonya PosmentierPart IV: Non-Normative Flourishing: Disability and AgingChapter 7: "Literary Study, the Hermeneutics of Disability, and the Eudaimonic Turn"Janet LyonChapter 8: "Wise Old Fools: Positive Geropsychology and the Poetics of Later-Life Floundering"Scott HerringPart V: Positive Affect: Redescription and RepairChapter 9: "Therapeutic Redescription"Beth BlumChapter 10: "Merely Ameliorative: Reading, Critical Affect, and the Project of Repair"Heather Love