This is the blog of “Illness as Fiction: Textual Afflictions in Print and Online”, an interdisciplinary research project funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant and led by Dr Maria Vaccarella (University of Bristol). This project will analyse the construction of fake patient identities in print and online with the instruments of illness narrative scholarship. Amidst the rise of fake news and Internet hoaxes, bogus illness accounts are particularly troubling. Drawing on research in literary criticism, psychiatry, and psychology, this project will illuminate how fake illness autobiographies are created, whether in the form of published books or in the realm of online peer-support communities (e.g. cases of Munchausen by Internet). Three workshops at the University of Bristol will produce interdisciplinary knowledge of these purely textual afflictions. With no pathologizing, moralising or criminalising intent, this project will shed light on contemporary societal understanding of the illness experience beyond the clinical environment. Research results will be published in a special issue of an interdisciplinary academic journal, while the development of the project will be described on this blog.
Illness as Fiction: Textual Afflictions in Print and Online
A research project on factitious illness narratives