Bodies of Modernism
Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature
Reveals the links, both positive and negative, between disabled bodies and aspects of modernism and modernity through readings of a wide range of literary texts
Description
Bodies of Modernism brings a new and exciting analytical lens to modernist literature, that of critical disability studies. The book offers new readings of canonical and noncanonical writers from both sides of the Atlantic including Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, Olive Moore, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, J. M. Synge, Florence Barclay, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Through readings of this wide range of texts and with chapters focusing on mobility impairments, deafness, blindness, and deformity, the study reveals both modernism’s skepticism about and dependence on fantasies of whole, “normal” bodies.
Maren Tova Linett is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University.
Reviews
"A perceptive and analytically rigorous book that continues an extremely important set of critical conversations surrounding modernism, the physical body, and the form of writing.”
- The Year's Work in English Studies
-- The Year's Work in English Studies