Awards

• Short-listed for British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize 2013
• Winner of Sonya Rudikoff Award 2013

Overview

Reading Victorian Deafness is the first book to address the crucial role that deaf people, and their unique language of signs, played in Victorian culture. Drawing on a range of works, from fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, to poetry by deaf poets and life writing by deaf memoirists Harriet Martineau and John Kitto, to scientific treatises by Alexander Graham Bell and Francis Galton, Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people's language use was a public, influential, and contentious issue in Victorian Britain. The Victorians understood signed languages in multiple, and often contradictory, ways: they were objects of fascination and revulsion, were of scientific import and literary interest, and were considered both a unique mode of human communication and a vestige of a bestial heritage. Over the course of the nineteenth century, deaf people were increasingly stripped of their linguistic and cultural rights by a widespread pedagogical and cultural movement known as ""oralism,"" comprising mainly hearing educators, physicians, and parents. Engaging with a group of human beings who used signs instead of speech challenged the Victorian understanding of humans as ""the speaking animal"" and the widespread understanding of ""language"" as a product of the voice. It is here that Reading Victorian Deafness offers substantial contributions to the fields of Victorian studies and disability studies. This book expands current scholarly conversations around orality, textuality, and sound while demonstrating how understandings of disability contributed to Victorian constructions of normalcy. Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people were used as material test subjects for the Victorian process of understanding human language and, by extension, the definition of the human.

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9780821420348

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Reviews

An extensively and assiduously researched study of Victorian Deafness as a multi-layered cultural entity … Reading Victorian Deafness makes a groundbreaking contribution to Disability Studies at large and Victorianist Disability Studies specifically. - Martha Stoddard-Holmes, author of Fiction of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture

An extensively and assiduously researched study of Victorian Deafness as a multi-layered cultural entity ... Reading Victorian Deafness makes a groundbreaking contribution to Disability Studies at large and Victorianist Disability Studies specifically. <br><br>-- Martha Stoddard-Holmes, author of Fiction of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture

As literary criticism has broadened to encompass aspects of sensory history, innovative scholarship continues to illuminate connections between overlooked texts and embodied experience. Jennifer Esmail's wide-ranging examination of Victorian deaf communities not only joins but also extends this endeavor. Her important, compelling book works at the junction of disability studies, sound studies, and English studies to alter conventional understandings of what it meant to communicate in the nineteenth century. <br><br>John Picker -- Comparative Media Studies and Literature, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and author of Victorian Soundscapes

An extensively and assiduously researched study of Victorian Deafness as a multi-layered cultural entity ... Reading Victorian Deafness makes a groundbreaking contribution to Disability Studies at large and Victorianist Disability Studies specifically. - Martha Stoddard-Holmes, author of Fiction of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture

Author Information

Jennifer Esmail is Director of the Centre for Community Partnerships at the University of Toronto. She was formerly Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She has published research on the representation of deafness and disability in Victorian literature and culture in ELH: English Literary History, Sign Language Studies, Victorian Poetry, and Victorian Review as well as on other topics including Community-University Engagement.

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