Philip Davis - Reading

The Arts for Health series aims to provide key information on how different arts and humanities practices can support, or even transform, health and well-being. Each book introduces a particular creative activity or resource and outlines its place and value in society, the evidence for its use in advancing health and well-being, and cases of how this works. In addition, each book provides useful links and suggestions to readers for following-up on these quick reads. We can think of this series as a kind of shadow health service encouraging the use of the arts and humanities alongside all the other resources on offer to keep us fit and well.

Creative practices in the arts and humanities offer a fantastic, non-medical, but medically relevant way to improve the health and well-being of individuals, families, and communities. Intuitively, we know just how important creative activities are in maintaining or recovering our best possible lives. For example, imagine that we woke up tomorrow to find that all music, books, or films had to be destroyed, learn that singing, dancing, or theatre had been outlawed, or that galleries, museums, and theatres had to close permanently; or, indeed, that every street had posters warning citizens of severe punishment for taking photographs, drawing or, writing. How would we feel? What would happen to our bodies and minds? How would we survive? Unfortunately, we have seen this kind of removal of creative activities from human society before and today many people remain terribly restricted in artistic expression and consumption.

I hope that this series adds a practical resource to the public. I hope people buy these little books as gifts for family and friends, or for hard-pressed healthcare professionals, to encourage them to revisit or to consider a creative path to living well. I hope that creative public health makes for a brighter future.

Professor Paul Crawford

The authors of this book come from the Centre of Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS), founded by Philip Davis at the University of Liverpool in 2011. It arose out of 30 years of teaching literature as a personal endeavour, particularly through the creation of part-time Masters courses attracting a wide range of non-conventional mature students, and five years of increasing collaboration with health professionals and psychologists to research the personal effects of reading.

The Reader was founded in 1997 by Jane Davis with Sarah Coley and Angela Macmillan after many years of teaching in the University of Liverpool Continuing Education programme. The aim of The Reader initially was to get great books out of the university and into the hands of people who need them.

These two enterprises developed in collaboration to secure a place for the serious reading of literature in a world where you were as unlikely to find a poem in an old peoples home or addiction rehab centre, as you were to find room for a personal reading of a great novel within a university literature course. Both The Reader and CRILS set out to change that, in the belief that literature is a tool for helping humans survive and live well.

The Reader has developed its shared reading model over the past 20 years, and CRILS brought together a multidisciplinary team to understand what goes on within that practice of small community groups reading aloud and thinking together. CRILS ceased to exist as a research unit on the formal retirement of Philip Davis in 2019, but its work continues through its many research associates, especially Professor Josie Billington at the University of Liverpool, and through writings such as this present book which brings together some of the research undertaken by members of the CRILS team over the past 10 years. See https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/humanities-social-sciences-health-medicine-technology/reading-literature-and-society/.

In 2019, The Reader opened its national headquarters at Calderstones Mansion House, in Calderstones Park, Liverpool, and launched the International Centre for Shared Reading where a wide programme of reading courses takes place. See www.thereader.org.uk for details.

The introductory question that provides our chapter title means, of course: What has reading got to do with health and well-being?

But before that lies a more aggressive version of the question: