Modernism and Physical Illness: Sick Books

This book is the first to consider to the role of physical illness in modernist writing. It argues that, not simply a biographical obstacle to writing, illness was actively positioned as a subject and method used to drive textual experimentation. It is not an interruption to writing but a full and complex phenomenon, whose aspects have experiential, social, racial, political, sexual, and aesthetic implications. This book considers a range of these. It proposes that illness is used as an altered, heightened type of experience; as a way of staging generic intersections between high and low culture; as a means by which female gender roles and tastes are constructed; as a framework of racial and class-based othering.