ABSTRACT
Scholarship on physical disability has dominated literary and cultural disability studies so far. Brenda Jo Brueggemann points out that physical disability is “the category that most people imagine when they think of ‘disability’” (12) and, in everyday life, the image of the wheelchair remains the most frequently used symbol of disability in all of its diverse forms. Although disability studies scholars and activists have argued for an understanding of disability as a social, political and cultural identity, rather than a fixed set of physical characteristics, in a literary context, imaginary works that deal with highly visible physical disabilities have remained at the centre of disability studies criticism. Founding critical works in the field have taken wide-ranging historical perspectives on representations of physical disability in literature. For example, Diane Price Herndl’s Invalid Women (1993) explores works between 1840 and 1940 and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture (1997) draws examples from mid-nineteenth- to late twentieth-century literature.
