{"title":"Epilogue: The Library of Comfort","authors":"Jürgen Pieters","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"In the book’s brief epilogue, a reading of Friedrich Frotzel’s painting ‘The Old Bookcase’ provides the occasion for a review of the book’s central argument.","PeriodicalId":329003,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Consolation","volume":"311 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116118031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fragments of a Consolatory Discourse: Sontag, Riley, Proust, Barthes","authors":"Jürgen Pieters","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"In the book’s final chapter, a discussion of Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club, a bibliotherapeutic memoir of the author’s mother’s end-of-life phase leads to a discussion of related writings by David Rieff (on his mother, Susan Sontag), Denise Riley (Time Lived, Without its Flow, an essay on the death of her son Jacob) and Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, written at the occasion of his mother’s death. The analyses of these writings build on the previous chapters’ analysis of the modern regime of consolation.","PeriodicalId":329003,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Consolation","volume":"107 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129826712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Christian Regime of Literary Comfort: From Boethius to Dante","authors":"Jürgen Pieters","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Taking its cue from two recent bibliotherapeutic publications on Dante (by Joseph Luzzi and Rod Dreher, respectively), the chapter tries to identify Dante’s central ideas on the consolatory effects of literature, which it takes as characteristic of the Christian regime of literary comfort. These ideas are illustrated in a reading of Purgatorio 2 (the Casella scene) and traced back to Dante’s fascination with Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, whose famous opening scene is also analysed: Lady Philosophy driving away the Muses of Poetry. The chapter also discusses Boethius and Dante’s interest in the figure of Orpheus, iconic consoler.","PeriodicalId":329003,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Consolation","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123802136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Religion of Despair: George Sand and Gustave Flaubert on Reading and Writing","authors":"Jürgen Pieters","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter starts off from a reading of Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, which it considers as a reflection on the limits of bibliotherapy. The novel is then related to the correspondence between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert (Winter 1875), in which the two writer friends take opposing sides in the debate on the consolatory purposes and effects of literature. Sand famously reproaches Flaubert of only being interested in the production of ‘desolation’.","PeriodicalId":329003,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Consolation","volume":"78 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124856634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards a Modern Regime of Literary Comfort: Shakespeare and the Failure to Console","authors":"Jürgen Pieters","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter starts off from Laura Bates’ Shakespeare saved my Life, the story of murder convict Larry Newton’s salutary encounter with the works of Shakespeare. It then moves on to a sustained reading of a number of scenes in four different plays by Shakespeare in which attempts at consolation significantly fail (Hamlet, Richard II, Measure for Measure and Romeo and Juliet). Drawing on writings by German philosopher Hans Blumenberg and Swedish author Stig Dagerman, the experience of failed consolation and inconsolability are identified as typical of the modern regime of comfort.","PeriodicalId":329003,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Consolation","volume":"74 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126208046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Classical Regime of Literary Comfort: From Homer to Aristotle","authors":"Jürgen Pieters","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter starts from a close reading of the famous scene of consolation between Achilles and Priamos in the Iliad’s closing book (Book 24). The logic of ‘eleos’ that governs the scene is related to what in the book is identified as the ‘classical regime of consolation’, derived from a number of consolatory writings that date from Antiquity (Crantor, Cicero, Seneca, …). In the chapter’s closing section the classical regime of comfort is related to Plato and Aristotle’s analyses of literary writing, the infamous discussion on ‘mimesis’.","PeriodicalId":329003,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Consolation","volume":"2016 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132889633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Novels of Comfort: Woolf, Winnicott and the Work of Consolation","authors":"Jürgen Pieters","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"The bibliotherapeutic publication that is central to this chapter is Katharine Smyth’s All the Lives we ever Lived, a touching memoir of her father’s illness in which the reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse provides the necessary consolation. The topic of literature’s consolatory powers is related in this chapter to Donald Winnicott’s analyses of ‘comforters’, what the British pyschoanalist labels ‘transitional objects’. The chapter also engages in a discussion of what David James calls ‘discrepant solace’.","PeriodicalId":329003,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Consolation","volume":"90 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129082737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Fictions of Comfort","authors":"Jürgen Pieters","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456555.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction to the book focuses on the current wave of bibliotherapy (for instance, Berthoud and Elderkin’s The Novel Cure) and singles out a number of fundamental questions with respect to the relationship between literature and consolation that underlie this reading practice. Taking its cue from a number of recent bibliotherapeutic writings, the introduction identifies the book’s central argument and highlights its structure.","PeriodicalId":329003,"journal":{"name":"Literature and Consolation","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127822474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}