Being Ill: Idioms, Registers and Styles

Monika Ładoń, Ireneusz Gielata

• Publisher: V&R Unipress
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783847019367
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This volume is a collection of studies on the experience of being ill as represented in a diverse range of literary and film works, offered by Polish scholars with an interest in the combination of medical, cultural and social contexts (disease, illness, sickness). The focus is on narrative strategies that condition the idiomatic styles of writing (about) disease. The analyses also cover extra-individual codes for expressing the experience of illness, arising from cultural orders or literary genres. The contributors examine cultural representations of melancholy, depression, Parkinson's disease and other boundary situations (e.g., mourning or COVID-19 pandemic). With its diversity of study approaches, the book inscribes itself in the widely defined Polish maladic discourse criticism.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Body
• Foreword
• Part 1. Idio‍(m)‍syncrasies of Illness
• Beata Koper: Disease, Illness and Sickness in Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill and Małgorzata Baranowska’s To jest wasze życie
• Jakub Orzeszek: Bodily Encounter. Poor Things and Eros Wings
• Maciej Duda: Representations and Transformations of Psychoanalytic Language and Hypotheses in Olga Tokarczuk’s Prose Writing
• Part 2. From the Bacillus of Melancholy to the Pathogen of Mourning
• Anna Wojciechowska-Ruppert: Melancholy as the Cultivation of Grief. The Father and Other Characters in Bruno Schulz’s Prose Works
• Hanna Serkowska: The D-Hour. A Study of Contemporary Polish Maladic Narratives
• Grzegorz Olszański: The Pathogen of Mourning
• Ireneusz Gielata: A Painful Jig: Choreography of Mourning in Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis and Kontener by Marek Bieńczyk
• Part 3. The Past and the Future of Illness. Literature Against Despair
• Monika Ładoń: Within the Diary, Outside the Novel. Imre Kertész, Jerzy Pilch, and Terminal Illness
• Agnieszka Gajewska: Illness, Adaptation and Suffering in Ursula Le Guin’s Speculative Fiction: An Analysis of the Novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home
• Krystyna Koziolek: Lessons from the Pandemic in the Time of Uncertainty