ENGL 226: Disability and Literature

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.

Disability history exists outside of the institutions, healers, and treatments it often brings to mind. It is a history where the disabled live not just as patients or cure-seekers, but rather as people living differently in the world - and it is also a history that helps define the fundamental concepts of identity, community, citizenship, and normality. The Oxford Handbook of Disability History is the first volume of its kind to represent this history and its global scale, from ancient Greece to British West Africa. The twenty-seven articles, written by thirty experts from across the field, capture the diversity and liveliness of this emerging scholarship. Whether discussing disability in modern Chinese cinema or on the American antebellum stage, this collection provides new and valuable insights into the rich and varied lives of the disabled across time and place.

Literature and Disability introduces readers to the field of disability studies and the ways in which a focus on issues of impairment and the representation of disability can provide new approaches to reading and writing about literary texts. Disability plays a central role in much of the most celebrated literature, yet it is only in recent years that literary criticism has begun to consider the aesthetic, ethical and literary challenges that this poses. The author explores: key debates and issues in disability studies today different forms of impairment, with the aim of showing the diversity and ambiguity of the term "disability" the intersection between literary critical approaches to disability and feminist, post-colonial, and autobiographical writing genre and representations of disability in relation to literary forms including novels, short stories, poems, plays and life writing This volume provides students and academics with an accessible overview of literary critical approaches to disability representation.

The Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies takes a multidisciplinary approach to disability and provides an authoritative and up-to-date overview of the main issues in the field around the world today. Adopting an international perspective and consisting entirely of newly commissioned chapters arranged thematically, it surveys the state of the discipline, examining emerging and cutting edge areas as well as core areas of contention.　 Divided in five sections, this comprehensive handbook covers: different models and approaches to disability how key impairment groups have engaged with disability studies and the writings within the discipline policy and legislation responses to disability studies and to disability activism disability studies and its interaction with other disciplines, such as history, philosophy and science and technology studies disability studies and different life experiences, examining how disability and disability studies intersects with ethnicity, sexuality, gender, childhood and ageing. Containing chapters from an international selection of leading scholars, this authoritative handbook is an invaluable reference for all academics, researchers and more advanced students in disability studies and associated disciplines such as sociology, health studies and social work.