Arthur is interested in how literary cultural studies can help us to unpack some of our assumptions in the modern world. This has led him in different directions, from authorship debates in late modernism to coal mining in the Naturalist novel, but all with the aim of figuring out how literary culture can help us understand about ourselves and our environments. For the past five years, Arthur has focused in how this understanding might affect our political engagement with health and the environment: how, for instance, breath works so well as a rhetorical figure in political movements because it so immediately raises the conditions of embodied situation in the world, or how asbestos, already implicated in the conspiracies of the companies that mined and manufactured it, comes to work so well as container for other forms of “fake news.”
For his work on the project, Arthur is looking at the way that shame is talked about (or not talked about) in medical memoirs.
See Arthur’s University of Exeter profile here.
For details on Arthur’s publications, presentations and talks related to the Shame and Medicine project visit Publications.
