Medicine and empathy in contemporary British fiction : an intervention in medical humanities / Anne Whitehead.

"Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction takes issue with the understanding of empathy as something that one has. Drawing on phenomenology and feminist affect theory, it positions empathy as something that one does and that is embedded within structural, institutional and cultural relations of power. More than this, it questions the assumption that empathy is limited to the clinical relation. Combining theoretical argument with literary case studies of books by Mark Haddon, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Aminatta Forna and Kazuo Ishiguro, this book also contends that contemporary fiction is not a vehicle for accessing another's illness experience, but is itself engaging critically with the question of empathy and its limits."--Back cover.