Overview

This Companion analyzes the representation of disability in literatures in English, including American and postcolonial writing, across all major time periods and through a variety of critical approaches. Through the alternative ideas of mind and embodiment generated by physiological and psychological impairments, an understanding of disability narrative changes the way we read literature. With contributions from major figures in literary disability studies, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability covers a wide range of impairments, including cognitive difference, neurobehavioral conditions, and mental and chronic illnesses. This book shows how disability demands innovation in literary form and aesthetics, challenges the notion of a human 'norm' in the writing of character, and redraws the ways in which writing makes meaning of the broad spectrum of humanity. It will be a key resource for students and teachers of disability and literary studies.

Full Product Details

Author:   Clare Barker (University of Leeds) ,  Stuart Murray (University of Leeds)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.70cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.520kg
ISBN:  

9781107087828

ISBN 10:   1107087821
Pages:   280
Publication Date:   16 November 2017
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: on reading disability in literature Clare Barker and Stuart Murray; Part I. Across Literatures: 2. Monsters, saints, and sinners: disability in Medieval literature Edward Wheatley; 3. Early modern literature and disability studies Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood; 4. Disability and deformity: function impairment and aesthetics in the long eighteenth century Essaka Joshua; 5. Embodying affliction in nineteenth-century fiction Martha Stoddard Holmes; 6. Paralyzed modernities and biofutures: bodies and minds in modern literature Michael Davidson; 7. The ambiguities of inclusion: disability in contemporary literature Stuart Murray; 8. 'Radiant affliction': disability narratives in postcolonial literature Clare Barker; Part II. Across Critical Methods: 9. Disability and the edges of intersectionality Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim; 10. The world-making potential of contemporary crip/queer literary and cultural production Robert McRuer; 11. Race and disability in US literature Michelle Jarman; 12. Disability and women's writing Sami Schalk; 13. Disability in genre fiction Ria Cheyne; 14. Signifying selves: disability and life writing G. Thomas Couser; 15. Disability rhetorics Jay Dolmage; 16. Afterword Petra Kuppers.

Reviews

'... an excellent collection of writing on representation.' Amanda Tink, Sydney Review of Books

Author Information

Clare Barker is Lecturer in English Literature (Medical Humanities) at the University of Leeds. She is the author of Postcolonial Fiction and Disability: Exceptional Children, Metaphor and Materiality (2011), and has co-edited two special issues of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, on 'Disabling Postcolonialism' (with Stuart Murray, 2010) and 'Disability and Indigeneity' (with Siobhan Senier, 2013). Her research focuses on representations of disability, health, and biomedicine in postcolonial literatures and film. Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film at the University of Leeds, where he is also Director of the Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities. He began working in disability studies following the diagnosis of his two sons with autism in 2002, taught the first course in a UK university on representations of disability in literature and film, and was the founding editor of the UK's first publishing series focused on representations of health and disability: Representations: Health, Disability, Culture and Society. His book Representing Autism (2008) was the first critical monograph on the topic, while Autism (2012) was the launch book in Routledge's Integrating Science and CulturE series.

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