Reading for Life is an anthology of poems and of extracts from prose
fiction, related to a series of case-histories of individuals carefully
reading, discussing their reading lives, and thinking about the relation
of literature to their existence. It enables readers to gain increased
imaginative access to the works in question through seeing how they have
intensely affected equivalent readers--a novelist, a poet, a doctor, a
teacher, an anthologist, but also non-specialists, ordinary people
within shared reading groups in many different settings, finding help
from literary texts in times of often painful personal need. It is the
story of the work done by Philip Davis' research unit, the Centre for
Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS), at the University
of Liverpool, in a ten-year partnership with the outreach charity The
Reader, taking serious literature to often neglected communities and
struggling individuals through the shared reading--alive and aloud--of
literature from all ages.
Reading for Life is a detailed account of what reading literature can
do for a wide variety of individuals in relation to a wide variety of
texts: it will be of interest to serious readers in the wider world as
much as to scholars working within literary studies, and to all those
involved in thinking about the therapeutic interactions of literature
and life in psychology, medicine, and mental health support settings.
