Epilogue

Abstract

The closing remarks restate the importance of illness to modernism, arguing that it is defamiliarization rather than diagnosis that is central to modernist illness. Literary modernism demonstrates an investment in non-normative bodies and their experience, not as case studies or symbols, but as lived objects that overspill medical classifications. Modernism’s careful attention to such variety and nuance is passed on to the reader, for whom the literary experience of other subjects is thus neither a simple extension of our own embodiment, nor wholly out of our imaginative ambit. Modernism shows the ill subject as other, but also embedded in a social world in which they play a full and lively role.