Abstract
This introduction to the special issue attempts to map the intersections between disability studies on the one hand and literature and cultural studies on the other hand. We discuss concepts of disability as a social construction before we turn to literary and cultural approaches to disability, which involve controversies and questions about genre, narrative frames, recurring themes, and form. The last section gives an overview of how literary representations of disability resonate with life writing and identity theories.
Acknowledgments
This special issue was initially conceptualized and proposed to ZAA by Marion Rana. When she decided to continue her work with disability outside the university, she asked Anita Wohlmann to step in and take over the editing of the issue. Our co-authored introduction reflects the collaborative formation process of this issue and our shared interest in raising awareness for the importance of disability within Anglophone and American literary studies. This paper and special issue was written and edited with support from the research program “The Uses of Literature” at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (grant no. DNRF127).
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©2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Narrating Disability in Literature and Visual Media: Introduction
- Relocating the Freak Show: Disability in the Medical Drama
- Writing Disability | Disabling Writing: E.T. Russian and the Fragmentation of Texts and Textures
- Towards a Science of the Self: Autism, Autobiography, and Animal Behavior in Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation
- Deafness and Ethnic Identity: The Idea of a Deaf State and its Resonances with American Exceptionalism and Frontier Ideology
- Book Reviews
- Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
- The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium
- Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility
- Books Received
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Narrating Disability in Literature and Visual Media: Introduction
- Relocating the Freak Show: Disability in the Medical Drama
- Writing Disability | Disabling Writing: E.T. Russian and the Fragmentation of Texts and Textures
- Towards a Science of the Self: Autism, Autobiography, and Animal Behavior in Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation
- Deafness and Ethnic Identity: The Idea of a Deaf State and its Resonances with American Exceptionalism and Frontier Ideology
- Book Reviews
- Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama
- The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium
- Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility
- Books Received