Poetry, “a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man” (John Keble).

I am currently at the beginning of a doctoral research project that will look at and aim to test the value of the foundations of bibliotherapy that are to be found within the literary tradition. Writers and thinkers such as the Victorian John Keble will be key to this research. Their work provides an existing tradition of thinking around the question of the use of reading to health. In this sense it is an ideal starting point for research.

As I am beginning to discover, current research on reading’s relationship to health covers a broad spectrum of interests. At present research in this area is growing, but is often carried out by individuals scattered across different disciplines, organisations and institutions. We would like to encourage and develop connections between these in order to enable a sharing and learning from each other’s research (and difficulties encountered along the way). If you are engaged in related research, or interested in developing a related research project, it would be really helpful if you could email me some basic details such as your name, how we can contact you, institutional affiliation and your specific research focus.

You can contact me by email (gracefarrington@thereader.org.uk). I look forward to hearing from you.

In my own experience, the attempt to launch an MA testing the claims of “bibliotherapy” – asking what kind of good it is that literature might do in the world of non-academic readers – found that the resistance from hard scientists was no greater than that from orthodox literature scholars.

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