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.
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.
