Resisting Cure Culture

Patients with chronic and incurable illnesses feel abandoned by medicine. Resisting Cure-Culture: Illness and Neighbor Love in Jane Austen's Theology explores why medicine fails to adequately care for those with chronic illnesses, focusing on chronic fatigue, through examining the cultural obsession with cures--cure-culture--and its origins in long 18th-century British consumer culture. Jaime Konerman-Sease turns to the novels of Jane Austen to find ways to resist cure-culture through her theology of illness and neighbor love.

Through exploring Mansfield Park and Emma, this book develops Austen’s theology of illness and neighbor love and applies it to contemporary life. Drawing on Austen’s approach to virtue and orienting health care around neighbor love radically transforms medicine from cure-focused to care-focused--fully able to care for those who cannot be cured. This book will interest scholars of disability, theology, bioethics, and medicine and literature. As an approachable exploration of Jane Austen’s fiction through the lens of disability, this book also has much to offer general audiences interested in Austen’s novels.