Editors' Note

Recent critical work in disability studies has suggested disability as another mode of analysis alongside class, race, gender, and sexuality in the understanding of culture. This special issue of Victorian Review takes on the topic of Victorian disability.

In our special forum on Victorian prostheses, contributors contemplate how addition, substitution, and extension have come to define the nature of both the body and the body politic. Understood in this light, the concept of the prosthesis includes everything from telescopes and baby incubators to artificial intelligence. Participating scholars write on technological and political as well as physical prostheses, challenging themselves (and us) to consider what the history of the prosthesis tells us about Victorian ideas of limits and the desire to expand, of ability and disability.

For the articles in this volume, we welcome guest editors Jennifer Esmail (Rutger's University) and Christopher Keep (University of Western Ontario). Under their guidance, contributors consider how a focus on ableness not only complicates traditional readings of gender, class, race, and sexuality in the period but also throws into relief the challenges that disability studies pose for Victorian studies.