Women (Re)Writing Illness as Their Own

Rachel N. Spear

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216268413
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Women (Re)Writing Illness as Her Own illuminates ways in which writing processes and products enable women to create spaces of their own-spaces that interrogate illness, challenge restitution (re)constructions, and work within and around various limitations associated with women writing illness.

Bridging trauma studies with women's studies, this collection blends creative writing and literary studies to explore how illness can weigh on the process of writing. The chapters examine narrative products to better understand how women write illnesses in relation to identity (re)constructions, how they challenge triumphant tropes, how they work within and beyond narrative and linguistic limitations, how the very metaphors and/or genres selected work to aid in their narrating processes, and how their writing acts and products work in conjunction with their illness and (sometimes) healing journeys.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Rachel N. Spear
• 1 Writing in the Background: Storying Professional and Bodily Liminality Elise Dixon and Rachel Robinson-Zetzer
• 2 Mothering In-Between: Mothers Creating Narratives of Breast Cancer Justine Dymond
• 3 “Envy” in Others: Responding to (Literary) Cancer Treatments Jocelyn Williams
• 4 Chronic Poetics and the Poetry of Chronic Illness (in a Global Pandemic) Emilia Nielsen
• 5 Tightened in a Difficult Union: Recounting Illness in Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations Federica Santini
• 6 The Reader in the Labyrinth of Susan E. King’s Treading the Maze Cynthia Northcutt Malone
• 7 “You Learn from the Part of the Story You Focus On”: Narrating Queer Trauma in Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette Sarah Smith and Christopher Bennett
• 8 Beyond Gubar’s Debulked Self: Re-Reading, Re-Writing, and Re-Presenting Cancer Rachel N. Spear
• Index
• About the Contributors