Reading and Mental Health

Josie Billington is Reader in English Literature and Deputy Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society at the University of Liverpool, UK. She has published widely on Victorian fiction and poetry and on interdisciplinary studies of the value of literary reading for health, including Is Literature Healthy? (2016).

• Chapter One. Introduction; Josie Billington.- PART ONE; READING AND HEALTH: MEDICINE TO LITERATURE, LITERATURE TO THERAPY.- Chapter Two. Comfort in a Whirlwind; Christopher Dowrick.- Chapter Three. The Sonnet Cure: Renaissance Poetics to Romantic Prosaics; Grace Farrington and Philip Davis.- Chapter Four. The Victorian Novel: Laying the Foundations for ‘Bibliotherapy’; Grace Farrington, Philip Davis and Josie Billington.- PART TWO; PRACTICES.- Chapter Five. Reading for Depression/Mental Health; Clare Ellis, Eleanor McCann, Anne Line Dalsgård.- Chapter Six. Reading for Dementia; Katie Clarke, Charlotte Weber, Susan McLaine.- Chapter Seven. Reading in Prisons; Alexis McNay, Charlie Darby-Villis,  Ann Walmsley.- Chapter Eight. Reading in Clinical Contexts; Grace Farrington, Kate McDonnell and Helen Cook.- PART THREE; RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES.- Chapter Nine.  Qualitative Methodologies I; Jude Robinson and Josie Billington, Ellie Gray and Gundi Kiemle, Melissa Chapple.- ChapterTen. Qualitative Methods II; Josie Billington and Philip Davis, Mette Steenberg, Grace Farrington and Fiona Magee, Thor Magnus Tangeraas, Kelda Green.- Chapter Eleven. Linguistic Approaches; Sofia Lampropulou and Kremena Koleva, Josie Billington, Philip Davis, Gavin Brookes and Kevin Harvey.- Chapter Twelve. Quantitative Methodologies; Rhiannon Corcoran, Josie Billington and Megan Watkins, Mette Steenberg, Charlotte Christianson, Nikolai Ladegaard, Don Kuiken.- Chapter Thirteen. Reading: Brain, Mind and Body; Philip Davis, Rhiannon Corcoran, Rick Rylance and Adam Zeman, David Kidd, Christophe de Bezenac.- PART FOUR; TOWARDS A THEORETICAL UNDERSTANDING OF READING AND HEALTH.- Chapter Fourteen. Reading and Psychiatric Practices; David Fearnley and Grace Farrington.- Chapter Fifteen. Reading and Psychology I, ‘Reading Minds: Fiction and its Relation to the Mental Worlds of Self and Others’; Rhiannon Corcoran and Keith Oatley.- Chapter Sixteen Reading and Psychology II, ‘Metaphoricity, Inexpressible Realizations, and Expressive Enactment’; Don Kuiken.- Chapter Seventeen. Reading and Psychoanalysis; Adam Phillips, Philip Davis.- PART FIVE; READING AND HEALTH: IMPLEMENTATION - BARRIERS AND ENABLERS.- Chapter Eighteen. Reading and Mental Health; Ellie Gray, Grace Farrington, Mette Steenberg.- Chapter Nineteen. Reading and Dementia; Martin Orrell and Tom Dening, Nusrat Husain, Sally, Rimkeit, Gill Claridge, Dalice Sim.- Chapter Twenty. Reading in Prisons; Fiona Magee.- Chapter Twenty One. Reading in a Clinical Context Reading and Chronic Pain; Kate McDonnell.