The Historicist Turn of Romantic‐Era Disability Studies, or Frankenstein in the Dark
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12880599 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fuson Wang (0000-0003-1416-7082, University of California, Riverside, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Publication date | 2017-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Literature Compass (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1741-4113 • E-ISSN: 1741-4113 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/lic3.12400 |
| OpenAlex | W2728726955 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 16 |
The field of disability studies has recently matured from its abstractly polemical origins to its current historicist orientation. This turn has allowed disability to become a key feature of mainstream contemporary literary scholarship. Romantic studies, though, has been relatively slow to adopt the new discourse. This essay offers a tentative explanation and a state‐of‐the‐nascent‐field assessment of Romantic‐era disability studies. Applying theory to practice, I show how both literary criticism and disability studies by themselves miss the point of Romantic‐era novel Frankenstein (1818). For example, a literary critical approach reads the theme of blindness as a metaphor for a kind of paradoxical insight, whereas a disability studies reading takes umbrage at the exploitation of the blind for narrative gain. Moving past this ideological impasse requires a more synthetic discourse that leverages the historicist turn of disability studies to model a more honest interpretation. By positioning the novel against Enlightenment theories of blindness, I argue that Shelley offers a more nuanced account of abnormal embodiment than disability scholars have traditionally allowed
Aesthetics · Art · Disability studies · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Historicism · Ideology · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Narrative · New Historicism · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Romance · Romanticism · Scholarship · Sociology · Theme (computing · Canadian Identity and History · Disability Rights and Representation · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Short Stories in Global Literature
Narrative Prosthesis
Staring How We Look
The Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville
Blindness and Visual Culture
Looking at the Monster
Disability Studies and American Literature
Disability Studies and the British Long Eighteenth Century
Reproducing Disability and Degeneration in the Victorian Fin de Siècle
Shakespeare and Disability Studies
The ugly laws
Extraordinary Bodies
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,13 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2018 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |