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  • Editor’s Note

Editor emeritus Philip F. Gura’s new book, Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel, has just been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It treats authors from William Hill Brown through Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

Call for Submissions

Early American Literature: Special Issue on “Early American Disability”

Disability studies scholars call disability the “master trope of human disqualification,” emphasizing its ubiquity across space and time as well as its sweeping relevance for all people in all places. Most of us will be disabled at some point in our lives, these scholars rightly point out, and we can all expect to become permanently impaired if we live long enough. These claims are politically and intellectually useful—perhaps even necessary—but they also rely on largely ahistorical assumptions about health, ability, bodies, and labor.

This special issue of Early American Literature seeks to identify the contributions that early American scholars can make to the field of disability studies, and to consider how critical attention to disability reframes our relationship to early America and the Atlantic world. We invite contributors to consider how historically nuanced perspectives—and early American perspectives in particular—alter our perceptions of impairments or broader categories of exclusion. How, for example, disabled, impaired, or unabled bodies register categories of race, class, gender, nation, and indigeneity. How plantation-based models of economy, militarized and domestic spaces, or exploration and captivity genres account for and narrativize differently abled bodies. Likewise, contributors might ask what defines disability in the early era, and how its modes of visibility (or invisibility) are constituted. What rhetorics and representational practices of disability were particular to an early American or Atlantic-world context? [End Page 811]

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