The therapeutic power of poetry in Ian McEwan’s Saturday and The Children Act

ABSTRACT

The present paper analyses the therapeutic power of poetry in the form of poetic epiphanies and epiphanic knowledge in medicine, in two illness narratives of Ian McEwan. The first novel Saturday deals with a patient suffering from Huntington’s disease. The second novel The Children Act deals with a leukemia patient. Both of these novels show how literary and creative art forms like poetry can generate epiphanic moments for the patient and epiphanic knowledge for medical professionals which act as moments of opportunity to cultivate and encourage empathetic clinical practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Poetry
• poetic epiphany
• epiphanic knowledge
• Saturday
• The Children Act

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Neha Hejaz

Neha Hejaz is a Research fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT(ISM) Dhanbad. Her primary research areas are medical humanities, modern fiction, literary criticism, and literary theory.

Rajni Singh

Rajni Singh is a Professor of English at IIT(ISM) Dhanbad. Her areas of interest include gender studies, women writing, environment studies, literary theory, and many more. She has published scholarly articles in reputed journals like Archive Orientali, Asian Theatre Journal, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) and South Asian Popular Culture.