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Resists the traditional reading of disability in Jane Eyre, instead suggesting new interpretations, parsing the trope of the Blindman, investigating the embodiment of mental illness, and proposing an autistic identity for Jane.
This breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre from a disability perspective provides fresh insight into Charlotte Bronte's classic novel from a vantage point that is of growing academic and cultural importance. Contributors include many of the preeminent disability scholars publishing today, including a foreword by Lennard J. Davis. Though an indisputable classic and a landmark text for critical voices from feminism to Marxism to postcolonialism, until now, Jane Eyre has never yet been fully explored from a disability perspective. Customarily, impairment in the novel has been read unproblematically as loss, an undesired deviance from a condition of regularity vital to stable closure of the marriage plot. In fact, the most visible aspects of disability in the novel have traditionally been understood in rather rudimentary symbolic terms - the blindness of Rochester and the "madness" of Bertha apparently standing in for other aspects of identity. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability, resists this traditional reading of disability in the novel. Informed by a variety of perspectives - cultural studies, linguistics, and gender and film studies - the essays in this collection suggest surprising new interpretations, parsing the trope of the Blindman, investigating the embodiment of mental illness, and proposing an autistic identity for Jane Eyre. As the first volume of criticism dedicated to analyzing and theorizing the role of disability in a single literary text, The Madwoman and the Blindman is a model for how disability studies can open new conversation and critical thought within the literary canon.
In this innovative and important study, Heather Tilley examines the huge shifts that took place in the experience and conceptualisation of blindness during the nineteenth century, and demonstrates how new writing technologies for blind people had transformative effects on literary culture. Considering the ways in which visually-impaired people used textual means to shape their own identities, the book argues that blindness was also a significant trope through which writers reflected on the act of crafting literary form. Supported by an illuminating range of archival material (including unpublished letters from Wordsworth's circle, early ophthalmologic texts, embossed books, and autobiographies) this is a rich account of blind people's experience, and reveals the close, and often surprising personal engagement that canonical writers had with visual impairment. Drawing on the insights of disability studies and cultural phenomenology, Tilley highlights the importance of attending to embodied experience in the production and consumption of texts.
The long 19th century-stretching from the start of the American Revolution in 1776 to the end of World War I in 1918-was a pivotal period in the history of disability for the Western world and the cultures under its imperial sway. Industrialization was a major factor in the changing landscape of disability, providing new adaptive technologies and means of access while simultaneously contributing to the creation of a mass-produced environment hostile to bodies and minds that did not adhere to emerging norms. In defining disability, medical views, which framed disabilities as problems to be solved, competed with discourses from such diverse realms as religion, entertainment, education, and literature. Disabled writers and activists generated important counternarratives, made increasingly available through the spread of print culture. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of history, literature, culture and education, A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century includes chapters on atypical bodies, mobility impairment, chronic pain and illness, blindness, deafness, speech dysfluencies, learning difficulties, and mental health, with 37 illustrations drawn from period sources.
A certain mad woman conceived through rape and later gave birth to a blind child. After her death; the child was raised by a certain old woman who gave them refuge. The child grew to be the wisest in the village; however the predicaments surrounding his birth made the villagers to hate and despise him in all occasions. Nevertheless; his wisdom and words of insights landed him into the palace
This book presents a literary and linguistic reading of obsessive-compulsive disorder to argue that medical understandings of disability need their social, political, literary and linguistic counterparts, especially if we aspire to create a more inclusive, self-reflective society.
This book argues that the most interesting depictions of blindness in French fiction are those which call into question and ultimately undermine the prevailing myths and stereotypes of blindness which dominate Western thought. Rather than seeing blindness as an affliction, a tragedy or even a fate worse than death, the authors examined in this study celebrate blindness for its own sake. For them it is a powerful artistic and creative force which offers new and surprising ways of describing, and relating to, reality. Canonical and lesser-known novels from a range of genres, including the roman noir, science fiction, auto-fiction and realism are analyzed in detail to show how the presence of blind characters invites the reader to abandon his or her traditional reliance on the sense of sight and engage with the world in sensual, and hitherto unexpected, ways. This book challenges everything we thought we knew about blindness and invites us to revel in the pleasures and perils of reading blind.
A multi-volume series that surveys European drama from ancient Greece to the mid-twentieth century.
What we can learn about caregiving and community from the Victorian novel In Communities of Care, Talia Schaffer explores Victorian fictional representations of care communities, small voluntary groups that coalesce around someone in need. Drawing lessons from Victorian sociality, Schaffer proposes a theory of communal care and a mode of critical reading centered on an ethics of care. In the Victorian era, medical science offered little hope for cure of illness or disability, and chronic invalidism and lengthy convalescences were common. Small communities might gather around afflicted individuals to minister to their needs and palliate their suffering. Communities of Care examines these groups in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, and Charlotte Yonge, and studies the relationships that they exemplify. How do carers become part of the community? How do they negotiate status? How do caring emotions develop? And what does it mean to think of care as an activity rather than a feeling? Contrasting the Victorian emphasis on community and social structure with modern individualism and interiority, Schaffer’s sympathetic readings draw us closer to the worldview from which these novels emerged. Schaffer also considers the ways in which these models of carework could inform and improve practice in criticism, in teaching, and in our daily lives. Through the lens of care, Schaffer discovers a vital form of communal relationship in the Victorian novel. Communities of Care also demonstrates that literary criticism done well is the best care that scholars can give to texts.
This book takes an exciting new approach to characterisation and plot in the Victorian novel, examining the vital narrative work performed by disabled characters.