ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability brings together some of the most influential and important contemporary perspectives in this growing field. The book traces the history of the field and locates literary disability studies in the wider context of activism and theory. It introduces debates about definitions of disability and explores intersectional approaches in which disability is understood in relation to gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality and ethnicity. Divided broadly into sections according to literary genre, this is an important resource for those interested in exploring and deepening their knowledge of the field of literature and disability studies.

part I|88 pages

New directions in the field

chapter 3|12 pages

t4t

Toward a crip ethics of trans literary criticism

chapter 4|14 pages

Challenging phonocentrism

Writing signs and bilingual Deaf literatures

chapter 5|13 pages

“Here there be monsters”

Mapping novel representations of the relationship between disability and monstrosity in recent graphic narratives and comic books

chapter 6|12 pages

Spectrality, strangeness, and stigmaphilia

Gothic and critical disability studies

chapter 7|13 pages

Contemporary horror and disability

Adaptations and active readers

part II|83 pages

Novels and short stories

chapter 8|12 pages

From “changelings” to “libtards”

Intellectual disability in the eighteenth century and beyond

chapter 9|11 pages

Crip gothic

Affiliations of disability and queerness in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)

chapter 10|12 pages

“Of wonderful use to everyone”

Disability and the marriage plot in the nineteenth-century novel

chapter 12|14 pages

“What’s the matter with him?”

Intellectual disability, Jewishness, and stereotype in Bernard Malamud’s “Idiots First”

chapter 13|11 pages

Metaphorical medicine

Disability in Anglophone Indian fiction

chapter 14|11 pages

Disability and contemporary literature

Antinormative narratives of embodiment

part III|72 pages

Poetry

chapter 15|12 pages

Poet and beggar

Edmund White’s Blindness

chapter 16|10 pages

Deafness and modernism

chapter 17|9 pages

The “fury of loving joyfully”

Amelia Rosselli’s War Variations

chapter 18|12 pages

Getting there

Pain poetics and Canadian literature

chapter 19|17 pages

Disability in contemporary poetry

chapter 20|10 pages

Disability poetry

Testing the waters of definition

part IV|63 pages

Drama

chapter 21|12 pages

Canadian disability dramaturgies

chapter 23|14 pages

Of scapeghosts and men

Shane Meadows’ Dead Man’s Shoes and the politics of learning disability

chapter 25|11 pages

Puppets, players and the poetics of vulnerability

Hijinx’s Meet Fred and new directions in the theatres of learning disability

part V|63 pages

Life writing

chapter 26|10 pages

Sex, death, and the welfare check

Rhythms of disability and sexuality in David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives

chapter 28|10 pages

A grammar of touch

Interdependencies of person, place, thing

chapter 29|13 pages

Psychographics

Graphic memoirs and psychiatric disability

chapter 30|12 pages

Challenging the neurotypical

Autism, contemporary literature, and digital textualities