The Humanities and Human Flourishing series publishes edited volumes that explore the role of human flourishing in the central disciplines of the humanities, and whether and how the humanities can increase human happiness.The contributors to this volume of essays investigate the question: what do literary scholars contribute to social scientific research on human happiness and flourishing?Of all humanities disciplines, none is more resistant to the program of positive psychology or the prevailing discourse of human flourishing than literary studies. The approach taken in this volume of essays is neither to gloss over that antagonism nor to launch a series of blasts against positive psychology and the happiness industry. Rather, the contributors reflect on how their literary research--work to which they are personally committed--might become part of an interdisciplinary conversation about human flourishing.The contributors' areas of research are wide ranging, covering literary aesthetics, book history, digital humanities, and reader reception, as well as the important "inter-disciplines" of gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and black studies-fields in which issues of stigma and exclusion are paramount, and which have critiqued the discourse of human flourishing for its failure to grapple with structural inequality and human difference. Literary scholars are drawn more readily to the problematic than to the decidable, but by dwelling on the trouble spots in a field of inquiry still largely confined to the sciences, Literary Studies and Human Flourishing provides the groundwork for new and more productive forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange.

Series Editor's Foreword by James O. PawelskiIntroduction by James F. English and Heather LovePart I: Happy Reading: Literature Without the AcademyChapter 1: "Bibliotherapy and Human Flourishing"Leah PriceChapter 2: "Bad Habits on Goodreads? Eclecticism vs Genre-Intolerance among Online Readers"James F. English, Scott Enderle, and Rahul DhakechaPart II: Flourishing Beyond Reason: Literature's Augmented RealitiesChapter 3: "Flourishing Spirits"Chris CastigliaChapter 4: "Sage Writing: Facing Reality in Literature"David RussellPart III: Flourishing in Crisis: The Poetics of DisasterChapter 5: "Literature of Uplift"David JamesChapter 6: "Black Ecological Optimism and the Problem of Human Flourishing"Sonya PosmentierPart IV: Non-Normative Flourishing: Disability and AgingChapter 7: "Literary Study, the Hermeneutics of Disability, and the Eudaimonic Turn"Janet LyonChapter 8: "Wise Old Fools: Positive Geropsychology and the Poetics of Later-Life Floundering"Scott HerringPart V: Positive Affect: Redescription and RepairChapter 9: "Therapeutic Redescription"Beth BlumChapter 10: "Merely Ameliorative: Reading, Critical Affect, and the Project of Repair"Heather Love