Real Recognition

This study looks at how recognition works in both literature and society. It brings together literary analysis and social theory to explore how readers come to identify with characters and how people are acknowledged by others.

The author examines recent fiction and writing from Denmark and the English-speaking world that deals with race, disability, and gender. She contends that the way a text invites recognition from its readers is closely tied to the political stakes of that text. To make sense of this, she sets out a framework grounded in experience and relationships rather than in identity and social standing.

Her central claim is that literature can help readers grasp what social validation actually involves, and in doing so can help redefine a key concept in the social sciences. The author earned her PhD in literature and sociology from the University of Southern Denmark in 2020. She now works as a postdoctoral researcher there, focusing on narrative medicine and literature-based social interventions, in collaboration with the National Institute of Public Health in Copenhagen.

Chapter 3 is freely available as an Open Access PDF from the Routledge website, published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license.