Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Narrating Self-Harm: Cultural Representations and Lived Experience

Narrating Self-Harm: Cultural Representations and Lived Experience

Murray, Stuart
Saunders, Corinne
Heney, Veronica

Hardcover

Series: Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities

Literary Criticism

PREORDER - Expected ship date June 4, 2027

ISBN10: 1350572861
ISBN13: 9781350572867
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Jun 4 2027
Pages: 256
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

An interdisciplinary exploration of the representation of self-harm in fiction, this open access book draws on close reading of a range of contemporary films, TV shows, novels, and plays through and alongside interviews with people with experience of self-harm, offering a unique perspective on the nature and impact of representation.

Self-harm is often both assumed and experienced as something that is particularly difficult to talk about, or to represent in fiction. This difficulty is partly associated with the widespread fear that depictions of self-harm lead readers or viewers to imitate the behaviour themselves. Self-harm can also simply feel difficult to talk about, due to stigma and silence, and hard to depict accurately, due to its many varied forms. This book explores that difficulty, picking apart how representations of self-harm might be limited, frustrating, or even harmful, while also investigating the significance, and even the joy, of certain representations.

Using data from in-depth qualitative interviews with people in the UK who self-harmed, where they reflected on fictional representations, and their impact on their lives, this book brings together analysis of this data with close readings of contemporary fictional texts, including novels, plays, films, and television, from ITV's My Mad Fat Diary to Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. In doing so, it combines Literary and Film Studies and Sociological methods to explore how self-harm is represented in contemporary UK and US fictional texts, and how those representations shape people's experiences.

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