Books in the Literary Disability Studies series

Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health brings together scholars working in disability studies, mad studies, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, postcolonial theory, Jewish literature, queer studies, American studies, trauma studies, and comics to create an intersectional community of scholarship in literary disability studies of mental health. The collection contains essays on canonical authors and lesser known and sometimes forgotten writers, including Sylvia Plath, Louisa May Alcott, Hannah Weiner, Mary Jane Ward, Michelle Cliff, Lee Maracle, Joanne Greenberg, Ann Bannon, Jerry Pinto, Persimmon Blackbridge, and others. The volume addresses the under-representation of madness and psychiatric disability in the field of disability studies, which traditionally focuses on physical disability, and explores the controversies and the common ground among disability studies, anti-psychiatric discourses, mad studies, graphic medicine, and health/medical humanities.

Why do able-bodied characters fake disability in 40 early modern English plays? By illuminating this neglected tradition, this book fills an important gap in both disability history and literary studies, and explores how fears of counterfeit disability created a feedback loop of performance and suspicion.

Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health brings together scholars working in disability studies, mad studies, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, postcolonial theory, Jewish literature, queer studies, American studies, trauma studies, and comics to create an intersectional community of scholarship in literary disability studies of mental health. The collection contains essays on canonical authors and lesser known and sometimes forgotten writers, including Sylvia Plath, Louisa May Alcott, Hannah Weiner, Mary Jane Ward, Michelle Cliff, Lee Maracle, Joanne Greenberg, Ann Bannon, Jerry Pinto, Persimmon Blackbridge, and others. The volume addresses the under-representation of madness and psychiatric disability in the field of disability studies, which traditionally focuses on physical disability, and explores the controversies and the common ground among disability studies, anti-psychiatric discourses, mad studies, graphic medicine, and health/medical humanities.

Why do able-bodied characters fake disability in 40 early modern English plays? By illuminating this neglected tradition, this book fills an important gap in both disability history and literary studies, and explores how fears of counterfeit disability created a feedback loop of performance and suspicion.

As there has yet to be any substantial scrutiny of the complex confluences a more sustained dialogue between disability studies and comics studies might suggest, Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives aims through its broad range of approaches and focus points to explore this exciting subject in productive and provocative ways.

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.

Authors discussed include William Blake, Lord Byron, Ann Batten Cristall, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Darley, Richard Payne Knight, William Gilpin, Mary Robinson, Mary Shelley, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth.

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.

Until the nineteenth century, consumptives were depicted as sensitive, angelic beings whose purpose was to die beautifully and set an example of pious suffering - while, in reality, many people with tuberculosis faced unemployment, destitution, and an unlovely death in the workhouse.

Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of "Loss" explores the many ways in which literature and film have engaged with the subject of amputation.

Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative engages with the cultural meanings and movements of blindness. This work reveals the performative enactment of blindness that is lived in the public as well as in the private corners of the self, demonstrating how blindness is a form of perception.

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability.

Autonomist Narratives of Disability in Modern Scottish Writing: Crip Enchantments explores the intersection between imaginaries of disability and representations of work, welfare and the nation in twentieth and twenty-first century Scottish literature. Disorienting effects erupt when non-normative bodies and minds clash with the structures of capitalist normalcy. This book brings into conversation Scottish studies, disability studies and Marxist autonomist theory to trace the ways in which these "e;crip enchantments"e; are imagined in modern Scottish writing, and the "e;autonomist"e; narratives of disability by which they are evoked.