The First World War gave new and vital impetus to the Victorian idea that books could heal trauma. This interdisciplinary collection provides a targeted survey of 100 years of historical and contemporary understandings and practices of ‘the book as cure’. The contributors explore the curative practices of wartime reading, how they were developed and institutionalized after the war, and the afterlives of these ideas and practices today. Divided into three sections, the first considers bibliotherapy in World War I.’ It is rooted in the wartime cultures which ensured bibliotherapy became part of the active treatment of soldiers’ damaged minds and bodies on both sides of the Atlantic after 1914. Parts two and three examine the expanding variety of critical contexts, both historical and more modern, in which reading and wellbeing continued to intersect. The chapters draw on a wide range of source material from trench magazines to autograph books to e-novels, as well as on data and information drawn from practice-based encounters. They also provide the basis for further scholarly exploration of, for example, national traditions and contexts and the inter-disciplinary relationships which they inspire. A Hundred Years of Bibliotherapy: Healing through Books provides the first interdisciplinary dialogue on and account of bibliotherapy, addressing both historical and present-day modes of engaging with the ostensibly curative power of reading and reading cultures. It is an invaluable resource for scholars of literary studies, book history, and the medical humanities.

Table of Contents:
Healing through Books: An Introduction; Part I: Bibliotherapy and the First World War; 1. The Legacy of Nineteenth-Century Therapeutic Reading in the First World War Hospital; 2. Galsworthy’s First World War Writing as Self-Care; 3. The American Library Association, ‘Bibliotherapy’ and the First World War ; 4. Autograph Books as Alleviation in British First World War Hospitals: A Case Study; 5. Print as Caregiving in Wartime: The Role of Australian First World War Trench and Hospital Magazines; Part II: Institutional Legacies from Libraries to Hospitals, 1919–1950; 6. ‘Return to Normalcy’: American Librarians and Bibliotherapy in the Aftermath of the First World War; 7. Can There Be a Science of Bibliotherapy? Imagining Bibliotherapy and Its Uses in a Modern Hospital; 8. The Curative Value of Reading: Hospital Libraries and Literary Therapeutics in Britain, 1919–1946; Part III: Contemporary Critical Interventions; 9. The Bibliotherapy Novel: Representations of Literary Caregiving and the Crisis of Print Culture, 1919–2019; 10.‘I liked them a lot...but I feel like I don’t know them fully?’: Implications of Recent Research in Immersion and Engagement for Digital Therapeutic Reading;11. Trauma and Literature: Current Bibliotherapeutic Practices and Literary Trauma Studies in Sweden; 12. Hoping Out Loud: Creative Bibliotherapy and Wellbeing Strategies; Index