What might the medical humanities be capable of doing?’ asked Viney, Callard, and Woods in their 2015 call for a critical medical humanities. This chapter endeavours to answer that question by investigating how ‘the literary’ is mobilized in health-focused projects whose commitment to interdisciplinary entanglement renders them exemplary of the field’s critical turn. We interviewed seven UK-based literary studies scholars about their work in two or more such projects in order to understand how ‘the literary’ (as discipline, approach, and praxis) features within project design and delivery, the roles taken up by the literary studies scholar, and the consequent effects on shared understandings about the functions of the literary text. One of the most striking findings of this exploratory study was the interviewees’ determination for the literary text to be considered in non-representational terms and concurrent commitment to championing novel articulations of the value and ‘use’ of literary endeavour.

This chapter explores transformations in the creation, transmission, and reception of Latin American poetries after 1980. One of these is ecopoetics, stimulated by shifting perspectives of both readers and writers living in a world in which we are increasingly aware of environmental change. Authors include Mexican Homero Arjidjis, Brazilian Astrid Cabral, Nicaraguan Esthela Calderón-Chevez, and Mapuche Elicure Chihauilaf. Other changes have to do with varying means of circulating poetry: through performance or electronic or multimedia presentations that expand what can be included in a poem, how it is constructed, and how it is received. We see this in Chilean Luis Díaz-Correa’s clickable poems, Argentine Belén Gache’s digital poems, and Uruguayans Juan Angel Italiano and Luis Bravo’s performative poetry. There are also contemporary approaches to reading Latin American poetries. Opening to transcontinental perspectives creates dialogues between North and South in Harris Feinsod’s and Charles Perrone’s approaches. Interdisciplinarity is a key feature of poetry considered in terms of health/illness, and looking at the work of Mexican Claudia Hernández del Valle Arizpe, Chilean Enrique Lihn, and Peruvian Victoria Guerrero Peirano demonstrates how lyric poetry is particularly suited to convey the body–mind collaboration or rebellion of serious illness.