Recovering disability in early modern England / Edited by Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Hobgood, Allison P., 1977-

Wood, David Houston.

Horace Howard Furness Memorial Library (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

English literature.

People with disabilities in literature.

Physical Description:

viii, 224 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Columbus : Ohio State University Press, 2013.

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 Modem 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 Prayer as textual accommodation for cognitive disability; and Thomas Hobbes s and John Locke's inherently ableist conceptions of freedom and political citizenship. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction : ethical staring : disabling the English Renaissance / Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood

Dwarf aesthetics in Spenser's Faerie queene and the early modern court / Sara van den Berg

Maternal culpability in fetal defects : Aphra Behn's satiric interrogations of medical models / Emily Bowles

Disability humor and the meanings of impairment in early modern England / David M. Turner

Antic dispositions : mental and intellectual disabilities in early modern revenge tragedy / Lindsey Row-Heyveld

Disabling allegories in Edmund Spenser's Faerie queene / Rachel E. Hile

Performing blindness : representing disability in early modern popular performance and print / Simone Chess

"There is no suff'ring due" : metatheatricality and disability drag in Volpone / Lauren Coker

Richard recast : Renaissance disability in a postcommunist culture / Marcela Kostihová

The Book of common prayer, theory of mind, and autism in early modern England / Mardy Philippian, Jr

Freedom and (dis)ability in early modern political thought / Nancy Hirschmann

Coda : Shakespearean disability pedagogy / Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780814212158

0814212158

9780814293164

0814293166

OCLC:

816029638