The First World War gave new and vital impetus to the ancient idea that books could heal. This interdisciplinary collection provides a targeted survey of 100 years of historical and contemporary understandings and practices of ‘the book as cure’. The contributors explore the curative practices of wartime reading, how they were developed and institutionalized after the war, and the afterlives of these ideas and practices today. Divided into three sections, the first considers bibliotherapy in World War I.’ It is rooted in the wartime cultures which ensured bibliotherapy became part of the active treatment of soldiers’ damaged minds and bodies on both sides of the Atlantic after 1914. Parts two and three examine the expanding variety of critical contexts, both historical and more modern, in which reading and wellbeing continued to intersect. The chapters draw on a wide range of source material from trench magazines to autograph books to e-novels, as well as on data and information drawn
