In this Book
- Recovering Disability in Early Modern England
- Book
- 2013
- Published by: The Ohio State University Press
summary
While early modern selfhood has been explored during the last two decades via a series of historical identity studies involving class, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexuality, until very recently there has been little engagement with disability and disabled selves in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. This omission is especially problematic insofar as representations of disabled bodies and minds serve as some of the signature features in English Renaissance texts. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England explores how recent conversations about difference in the period have either overlooked or misidentified disability representations. It also presents early modern disability studies as a new theoretical lens that can reanimate scholarly dialogue about human variation and early modern subjectivities even as it motivates more politically invested classroom pedagogies. The ten essays in this collection range across genre, scope, and time, including examinations of real-life court dwarfs and dwarf narrators in Edmund Spenser’s poetry; disability in Aphra Behn’s assessment of gender and femininity; disability humor, Renaissance jest books, and cultural ideas about difference; madness in revenge tragedies; Spenserian allegory and impairment; the materiality of literary blindness; feigned disability in Jonsonian drama; political appropriation of Richard III in the postcommunist Czech Republic; the Book of Common Prayeras textual accommodation for cognitive disability; and Thomas Hobbes’s and John Locke’s inherently ableist conceptions of freedom and political citizenship.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. 2-3
- List of Illustrations
- pp. v-vi
- Acknowledgments
- pp. vii-viii
- Coda: Shakespearean Disability Pedagogy
- pp. 187-192
- Works Cited
- pp. 193-208
- Contributors
- pp. 209-211
Additional Information
ISBN
9780814270134
Related ISBN(s)
9780814212158
MARC Record
OCLC
867741131
Pages
240
Launched on MUSE
2013-11-04
Language
English
Open Access
Yes