The Voice of the Organs (Isabelle Lange and Zoë Norridge, eds., Illness, Bodies and Contexts: Interdisciplinary Perspectives)

Illness, Bodies and Contexts: Interdisciplinary Perspectives is an anthology of articles on various somatic and psychic maladies and their cultural, social, and literary implications. As the latest volume of the series Probing the Boundaries: Innovative Dialogue, this conference volume published in the form of an e-book makes available for the wider academic public the presentations held at the 2005 conference in Oxford entitled Making Sense of Heath, Illness and Disease. Representing a major departure from rigid disciplinary boundaries, the texts provide a stunningly wide range of studies in a logical, creative, and even reader-friendly way, and also successfully integrate polemic, therapeutic as well as aesthetic points of view. The book will surely prove a useful source of research and teaching for scholars working in various fields of cultural studies from gender studies through body studies to visual culture, since it does not only rely upon various theoretical discourses, but it also presents a colourful scale of case studies in the interconnected fields of social sciences, arts, and medicine. Just as illness itself can be symbolically read as transgression in the widest sense, a disruption of the (social) body's boundaries, this anthology will hopefully be just as "contagious", and will considerably promote cross-disciplinary research by interpreting contemporary Western discourses on illness as meta-narratives of naturalized, normalized bodies.