Brian Brown

Paul Crawford

Andrea Charise

Divided into two main sections, the Companion looks at "Reflections" - offers current thinking and definitions within health humanities, and "Applications" comprises a wide selection of a range of arts and humanities modalities from comedy and writing to dancing, yoga and horticulture.

The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities

Investigates how nineteenth-century British literature grappled with a new understanding of aging as both an individual and collective experience. The Aesthetics of Senescence investigates how chronological age has come to possess far-reaching ideological, ethical, and aesthetic implications, both in the past and present. Andrea Charise argues that authors of the nineteenth century used the imaginative resources of literature to engage with an unprecedented climate of crisis associated with growing old. Marshalling a great variety of canonical authors including William Godwin, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and George Gissing, as well as less familiar writings by George Henry Lewes, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Agnes Strickland, and Max Nordau, Charise demonstrates why the imaginative capacity of writing became an interdisciplinary crucible for testing what it meant to grow old at a time of profound cultural upheaval. Charise’s grounding in medicine, political history, literature, and genre offers a fresh, original, thoroughly interdisciplinary analysis of nineteenth-century aging and age theory, as well as new insights into the rise of the novel—a genre usually thought of as affiliated almost entirely with the young or middle-aged. “Charise’s brilliantly argued, clearly written book is an important intervention in nineteenth-century British literature, age studies, and medical humanities. It brings these areas of inquiry together in what seems a seamless way—as if they have always traveled together or ought to have. Through an investigation of what she calls the ‘aesthetics of embodiment that shaped nineteenth-century visions of aging,’ Charise has given us an original and groundbreaking study of literary, historical, anthropological, and philosophical texts.” — Devoney Looser, author of The Making of Jane Austen

Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

The Aesthetics of Senescence

"The health humanities is a rapidly rising field, advancing an inclusive, democratizing, activist, applied, critical and culturally diverse approach to delivering health and wellbeing through the arts and humanities. It has generated new kinds of interdisciplinary research, knowledge and communities of practice globally. It has also acted to bring greater coherence and political force to contributions across a range of related disciplines and traditions. In this volume, a formidable set of authors explore the history, current state and future of the health humanities, in particular how its vision of the arts and humanities: Promotes creative public health; Opens new routes to health and wellbeing; Informs and drives better healthcare; Interrogates relationships between ill health and social equality; Develops humanist theory in relation to health and social care practice; Foregrounds cultural difference as a resource for positive change in society; Tests the humanity of an increasingly globalized health care system; Looks to overcome structural and process obstacles to cross-disciplinary ventures; Champions co-construction, co-design and mutuality in solving health and wellbeing challenges; Showcases less familiar, prominent or celebrated creative practices; Includes multiple perspectives on the value and health benefits of the arts and humanities not limited to or dominated by medicine. Divided into two main sections, the Companion looks at "Reflections and Critical Perspectives," offering current thinking and definitions within health humanities; and "Applications," comprising a wide selection of applied arts and humanities practices from comedy, writing and dancing to yoga, cooking and horticultural display"--

Andrea Charise

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