"I face a dark future". Letters from the Leprosy Archives, Bergen
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5463/ejlw.7.232Keywords:
Patient letters, leprosy, leprosy politics in Norway, 19th century, narrative theory, small storiesAbstract
The article focuses on patient letters sent by leprosy patients or their family members applying for place at a leprosy hospital. They were written between 1871 and 1911, are today part of the Leprosy Archives in Bergen and have not been presented, contextualised and analysed before. The article aims at both unveiling the illness experiences of those who suffered from the disease and demonstrating the way they recount their experiences in these letters. The concept of ‘small stories’ (M. Bamberg / A. Georgakopoulou) serves as entry points to access the narrative techniques in these autobiographic and biographic documents.
Published
Issue
Section
Copyright (c) 2018 Marie-Theres Federhofer
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
