Self-Literacy
Writing Out Personhood
Published on 22. August 2025
230 pages
978-1-040-36436-9 (ISBN)
Description
Self-Literacy: Writing Out Personhood offers fifty perspectives on gaining an understanding of what 'personhood' may mean through various disciplines. Literature is a key medium through which selves are mapped as humans are written into being. Such literature is intimately tied to health such as within self-help literature, written accounts of illness, or of characters who are defined by their afflictions - physical, psychological, and moral. This book adopts an essay approach to aspects of selfhood, including disciplines of psychology (personality), sociology (social selves), anthropology (cultural selfhood), literary (the self as portrayed in literature), and history (notions of self through time). Each chapter can be read in isolation, and a comprehensive list of works on self is provided as a bibliography. This book will appeal to researchers and postgraduates engaged in the fields of Literature and Health Humanities, as well as psychology, sociology, and anthropology academics and students.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
11 Halftones, black and white; 11 Illustrations, black and white
File size
9,96 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-040-36436-9 (9781040364369)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
08/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€207.60
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Book
07/2025
Routledge
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Person
Alan Bleakley is Emeritus Professor of Medical Education and Medical Humanities at Plymouth Peninsula School of Medicine, Faculty of Health, University of Plymouth, UK. He is a leading international figure in medical education and medical humanities and is widely published as both an academic and poet.
Content
Preface
00 Introduction: The self, not a given but a problem
01 The camouflaged self
02 Authentic and inauthentic selves: duty of candour and whistleblowers
03 Ancient Greek practices of self-forming
04 Self as flaneur
05 Authenticity with muscle: the ancient Greek hero
06 Familiars
07 Renaissance self-fashioning
08 The alchemical self as outlaw: an experiment in embodied metaphor
09 Animal or plant self?: Geography matters
10 The enlightenment self as 'subject to' King and Divinity
11 The enlightened self: beyond subjection
12 Unique identifiers: fingerprints and ears
13 Talking yourself up: illeism
14 Possessed and absent selves
15 The modern ego: the all-seeing 'I'
16 The origins of 'self-help'
17 The relational self
18 Self stripped of rights
19 Self engulfed by panic
20 The self-righteous narcissist
21 Paranoia: beside oneself
22 The translational self: an attractor in a dynamic, complex system
23 The narrative construction of self
24 Personal confessional narratives constitute a confessional self
25 The self's new religion: secular and humanistic
26 Writing out the modern self: postmodern prescriptions
27 Cancelling the self: postmodern anti-narrativists
28 As mad as a hatter: neurodivergent selves
29 Self-consciousness without consciousness: tacit knowing
30 Bodies at their limits: intentional self-fashioning
31 Wired for subjectivity
32 Loneliness
33 The fashioning of family
34 Feminist selves
35 Self as laboratory rat
36 The self in pieces: the yips
37 Mods
38 Politicised junior doctors
39 The progressively absent self
40 A roof over yourself
41 From carbon to silicon
42 Differance
43 Lacanian subjectivities
44 The neurological self
45 The linguistic transactional self in surgical settings
46 Subject to power/power runs through the subject
47 Bodies that are no-bodies: the biological self
48 The universal SELF
49 Subject to the abject
50 The final straw: the self's last sip of life's juice
Appendix: The disposable self as 'worm'
00 Introduction: The self, not a given but a problem
01 The camouflaged self
02 Authentic and inauthentic selves: duty of candour and whistleblowers
03 Ancient Greek practices of self-forming
04 Self as flaneur
05 Authenticity with muscle: the ancient Greek hero
06 Familiars
07 Renaissance self-fashioning
08 The alchemical self as outlaw: an experiment in embodied metaphor
09 Animal or plant self?: Geography matters
10 The enlightenment self as 'subject to' King and Divinity
11 The enlightened self: beyond subjection
12 Unique identifiers: fingerprints and ears
13 Talking yourself up: illeism
14 Possessed and absent selves
15 The modern ego: the all-seeing 'I'
16 The origins of 'self-help'
17 The relational self
18 Self stripped of rights
19 Self engulfed by panic
20 The self-righteous narcissist
21 Paranoia: beside oneself
22 The translational self: an attractor in a dynamic, complex system
23 The narrative construction of self
24 Personal confessional narratives constitute a confessional self
25 The self's new religion: secular and humanistic
26 Writing out the modern self: postmodern prescriptions
27 Cancelling the self: postmodern anti-narrativists
28 As mad as a hatter: neurodivergent selves
29 Self-consciousness without consciousness: tacit knowing
30 Bodies at their limits: intentional self-fashioning
31 Wired for subjectivity
32 Loneliness
33 The fashioning of family
34 Feminist selves
35 Self as laboratory rat
36 The self in pieces: the yips
37 Mods
38 Politicised junior doctors
39 The progressively absent self
40 A roof over yourself
41 From carbon to silicon
42 Differance
43 Lacanian subjectivities
44 The neurological self
45 The linguistic transactional self in surgical settings
46 Subject to power/power runs through the subject
47 Bodies that are no-bodies: the biological self
48 The universal SELF
49 Subject to the abject
50 The final straw: the self's last sip of life's juice
Appendix: The disposable self as 'worm'
