Dementia and Literature: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge Advances in the Medical Humanities)

"Dementia is an urgent global concern, often termed a widespread 'problem', 'tragedy' or 'burden' and a subject best addressed by health and social policy and practice. However, creative writers can offer powerful and imaginative insights into the experience of dementia across cultures and over time. This cross-disciplinary volume explores how engaging with dementia through its myriad literary representations can help to deepen and humanise attitudes to people living with the condition. Offering and interrogating a wide array of perspectives about how dementia might be 'imagined', this book allows us to see how different ways of being can inflect one another. By drawing on the 'lived' experience of the individual unique person and their loved ones, literature can contribute to a deeper and more compassionate and more liberating attitude to a phenomenon that is both natural and unnatural. Novels, plays and stories reveal a rich panoply of responses ranging from the tragic to the comic, allowing us to understand that people with dementia often offer us models of humour, courage and resilience, and carers can also embody a range of responses from rigidity to compassion. Dementia and Literature problematises the subject of dementia, encouraging us all to question our own hegemonies critically and creatively. Drawing on literary studies, cultural studies, education, clinical psychology, psychiatry, nursing and gerontology, this book is a fascinating contribution to the emerging area of the medical and health humanities. The book will be of interest to those living with dementia and their caregivers as well as to the academic community and policy makers."--Provided by publisher "Dementia is an urgent global concern, often termed a widespread'problem', 'tragedy' or'burden' and a subject best addressed by health and social policy and practice. However, creative writers can offer powerful and imaginative insights into the experience of dementia across cultures and over time. This cross-disciplinary volume explores how engaging with dementia through its myriad literary representations can help to deepen and humanise attitudes to people living with the condition. Offering and interrogating a wide array of perspectives about how dementia might be'imagined', this book allows us to see how different ways of being can inflect one another. By drawing on the'lived' experience of the individual unique person and their loved ones, literature can contribute to a deeper and more compassionate and more liberating attitude to a phenomenon that is both natural and unnatural. Novels, plays and stories reveal a rich panoply of responses ranging from the tragic to the comic, allowing us to undiferstand that people with dementia often offer us models of humour, courage and resilience, and carers can also embody a range of responses from rigidity to compassion. Dementia and Literature problematises the subject of dementia, encouraging us all to question our own hegemonies critically and creatively. Drawing on literary studies, cultural studies, education, clinical psychology, psychiatry, nursing and gerontology, this book is a fascinating contribution to the emerging area of the medical and health humanities. The book will be of interest to those living with dementia and their caregivers as well as to the academic community and policy makers."--Provided by publisher Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 Notes on contributors 8 Foreword 12 Acknowledgements 15 Introduction 16 1 Entering a new landscape: dementia in literature 36 2 Dementia and symbiosis in Waiting for Godot 52 3 ‘Poor, bare fork’d animal’: the representation of dementia in King Lear 68 4 Representations of dementia in Arabic literature 86 5 Missing pieces: trauma, dementia and the ethics of reading in Elizabeth is missing 103 6 Personal identity and personhood: the role of fiction and biographical accounts in dementia 118 7 Language breakdown and the construction of meaning: linguistic frameworks for readings of dementia in literature 130 8 Beyond shadow and play: different representations of dementia in contemporary Scandinavian literature 148 9 Dementia in recent Indian fiction in English 163 10 Arts and healing: learning from dementia literature 175 Index 189 Dementia is an urgent global concern. Creative writers can offer powerful and imaginative insights into the experience of dementia across cultures and over time. This volume explores how engaging with dementia through its myriad literary representations can help to deepen and humanize attitudes to people living with the condition.