Narrating Self-Harm

Narrating Self-Harm Synopsis

An interdisciplinary exploration of the representation of self-harm in fiction, this open access book draws on close reading of a range of contemporary films, TV shows, novels, and plays through and alongside interviews with people with experience of self-harm, offering a unique perspective on the nature and impact of representation. Self-harm is often both assumed and experienced as something that is particularly difficult to talk about, or to represent in fiction.

This difficulty is partly associated with the widespread fear that depictions of self-harm lead readers or viewers to imitate the behaviour themselves. Self-harm can also simply feel difficult to talk about, due to stigma and silence, and hard to depict accurately, due to its many varied forms. This book explores that difficulty, picking apart how representations of self-harm might be limited, frustrating, or even harmful, while also investigating the significance, and even the joy, of certain representations.

Using data from in-depth qualitative interviews with people in the UK who self-harmed, where they reflected on fictional representations, and their impact on their lives, this book brings together analysis of this data with close readings of contemporary fictional texts, including novels, plays, films, and television, from ITV's My Mad Fat Diary to Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life. In doing so, it combines Literary and Film Studies and Sociological methods to explore how self-harm is represented in contemporary UK and US fictional texts, and how those representations shape people's experiences.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Open access was funded by The Wellcome Trust.