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This article is about the relationship between reading, trauma and responsive literary caregiving in Britain during the First World War. Its analysis of two little-known documents describing the history of the War Library, begun by Helen Mary Gaskell in 1914, exposes a gap in the scholarship of war-time reading; generates a new narrative of "how," "when," and "why" books went to war; and foregrounds gender in its analysis of the historiography. The Library of Congress's T. W. Koch discovered Gaskell's ground-breaking work in 1917 and reported its successes to the American Library Association. The British Times also covered Gaskell's library, yet researchers working on reading during the war have routinely neglected her distinct model and method, skewing the research base on war-time reading and its association with trauma and caregiving. In the article's second half, a literary case study of a popular war novel demonstrates the extent of the "bitter cry for books." The success of Gaskell's intervention is examined alongside H. G. Wells's representation of textual healing. Reading is shown to offer sick, traumatized and recovering combatants emotional and psychological caregiving in ways that she could not always have predicted and that are not visible in the literary/historical record.Keywords First world war . Reading . Trauma . Literary caregiving . Helen Mary Gaskell . War library In July 1937, the Book Trolley, the magazine of the guild of hospital librarians, published a brief history of libraries in hospitals. Owing to the writer's (self-confessed) advanced age and poor health, the piece was shorter than it might have been. Mrs. Gaskell, C.B.E., knew that in different circumstances she could have written Ba good deal on the Past.^But she welcomed the opportunity to provide an account of the Bdifficulties and influences^under which libraries in hospitals had begun, and she returned to two international conflicts to do so: the Boer War This article is about Helen Mary Gaskell's War Library and the model of literary caregiving on which it was founded -and so it is also concerned with the early history of what would become known as bibliotherapy.1 Gaskell chose a quotation from Titus Andronicus to head her 1918 pamphlet: BTake choice of all my Library, and so beguile thy sorrow^ (1918, 1). The second half of this article presents a case study which demonstrates, using contemporary evidence, the ways in which books did help to Bbeguile sorrow,^having placed Gaskell and her library accurately in the history of reading during the First World War.This scholarship, a currently vibrant area of book history, mostly adopts the analytical framework first established by Robert Darnton in 1986. We now know more about the Bwhat,B where,^and Bhow^of reading during the conflict than ever before (Darnton 2014, 165). 2 We also know more about the Bwho^-as the historic focus on élite readers (as an extension from élite writers) has been challenged by more inclusive, broader assessments (Sutcliffe 2016, King 2014b, Ja...
This article is about the relationship between reading, trauma and responsive literary caregiving in Britain during the First World War. Its analysis of two little-known documents describing the history of the War Library, begun by Helen Mary Gaskell in 1914, exposes a gap in the scholarship of war-time reading; generates a new narrative of "how," "when," and "why" books went to war; and foregrounds gender in its analysis of the historiography. The Library of Congress's T. W. Koch discovered Gaskell's ground-breaking work in 1917 and reported its successes to the American Library Association. The British Times also covered Gaskell's library, yet researchers working on reading during the war have routinely neglected her distinct model and method, skewing the research base on war-time reading and its association with trauma and caregiving. In the article's second half, a literary case study of a popular war novel demonstrates the extent of the "bitter cry for books." The success of Gaskell's intervention is examined alongside H. G. Wells's representation of textual healing. Reading is shown to offer sick, traumatized and recovering combatants emotional and psychological caregiving in ways that she could not always have predicted and that are not visible in the literary/historical record.Keywords First world war . Reading . Trauma . Literary caregiving . Helen Mary Gaskell . War library In July 1937, the Book Trolley, the magazine of the guild of hospital librarians, published a brief history of libraries in hospitals. Owing to the writer's (self-confessed) advanced age and poor health, the piece was shorter than it might have been. Mrs. Gaskell, C.B.E., knew that in different circumstances she could have written Ba good deal on the Past.^But she welcomed the opportunity to provide an account of the Bdifficulties and influences^under which libraries in hospitals had begun, and she returned to two international conflicts to do so: the Boer War This article is about Helen Mary Gaskell's War Library and the model of literary caregiving on which it was founded -and so it is also concerned with the early history of what would become known as bibliotherapy.1 Gaskell chose a quotation from Titus Andronicus to head her 1918 pamphlet: BTake choice of all my Library, and so beguile thy sorrow^ (1918, 1). The second half of this article presents a case study which demonstrates, using contemporary evidence, the ways in which books did help to Bbeguile sorrow,^having placed Gaskell and her library accurately in the history of reading during the First World War.This scholarship, a currently vibrant area of book history, mostly adopts the analytical framework first established by Robert Darnton in 1986. We now know more about the Bwhat,B where,^and Bhow^of reading during the conflict than ever before (Darnton 2014, 165). 2 We also know more about the Bwho^-as the historic focus on élite readers (as an extension from élite writers) has been challenged by more inclusive, broader assessments (Sutcliffe 2016, King 2014b, Ja...
Bibliotherapy, the therapeutic use of reading, was introduced to the U.S Military in World War II by the Council on Books in Wartime, a non-profit organization who sent millions of books to deployed servicemen. Since its effectiveness was never examined, the military’s use of bibliotherapy ended with the war. Therefore, this study focused on analyzing the effect of the Council on Books in Wartime's book contributions upon homesickness and stress in deployed servicemen in WWII. The findings would evaluate the effectiveness of reading as a tool to mitigate homesickness and stress, two factors which heavily impact the mental wellbeing of deployed servicemen and women. To conduct this study, a retrospective correlational case study was conducted on a sample of eight WWII veterans, two of which reported reading while six reported never reading during their service. Each veteran was interviewed with questions derived from the Utrecht Homesickness Scale and the Perceived Stress Scale to quantify the change between both variables after reading. The data was disaggregated for those who did read and those who did not and further disaggregated into early-deployment and late deployment (or pre-reading and post-reading). After conducting the interviews, it was found that the difference between the change in both groups (those who did read and those who did not) was statistically significant for both homesickness and stress. Although there are a number of limitations to the results of this study, the data does suggest that there is a negative correlation between reading and homesickness and stress.
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