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Evaluating Illness in Women’s Magazines

University of Queensland

Frances Bonner

University of Queensland

Traditionally, mass-market women’s magazines have been a significant source of health information for their readers and include information about raising children, maintaining health, and growing older as well as dealing with grief, chronic illness, and disability. This information occurs in medical information articles, advice columns, and stories that relate the personal experience of illness. This study focuses on the last category, personal illness narratives, and looks at these stories over the past 20 years in three high-circulation Australian mass-market magazines to investigate their characteristics and possible functions. The approach used is qualitative with an emphasis on textual features and discourse structures and investigates the evaluation phase of the narratives. It finds four major themes in the evaluations and suggests that these are used to demonstrate the resilience of the human condition and to give inspiration to the readers.

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