A Hundred Years of Bibliotherapy

The First World War gave new and vital impetus to the ancient idea that books could heal. 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 Wor