Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian CultureUniversity of Michigan Press, 09.02.2010 - 248 Seiten "Highly recommended . . . Holmes moves seamlessly from novelists like Charles Dickens to sociologists like Henry Mayhew to autobiographers like John Kitto." ---Choice "An absolutely stunning book that will make a significant contribution to both Victorian literary studies and disability studies." ---Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory University "Establishes that Victorian melodrama informs many of our contemporary notions of disability . . . We have inherited from the Victorians not pandemic disability, but rather the complex of sympathy and fear." ---Victorian Studies Tiny Tim, Clym Yeobright, Long John Silver---what underlies nineteenth-century British literature's fixation with disability? Melodramatic representations of disability pervaded not only novels, but also doctors' treatises on blindness, educators' arguments for "special" education, and even the writing of disabled people themselves. Drawing on extensive primary research, Martha Stoddard Holmes introduces readers to popular literary and dramatic works that explored culturally risky questions like "can disabled men work?" and "should disabled women have babies?" and makes connections between literary plots and medical, social, and educational debates of the day. Martha Stoddard Holmes is Associate Professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University, San Marcos. |
Inhalt
| 1 | |
1 Melodramatic Bodies | 16 |
2 Marital Melodramas Disabled Women and Victorian Marriage Plots | 34 |
3 My Old Delightful SensationWilkie Collins and the Disabling of Melodrama | 74 |
4 An Object for Compassion An Enemy to the StateI magining Disabled Boys and Men | 94 |
5 Melodramas of the Self Autobiographies of Victorians with Physical Disabilities | 133 |
Conclusion | 191 |
Appendix | 197 |
Notes | 201 |
Works Cited | 211 |
Index | 223 |
Andere Ausgaben - Alle anzeigen
Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture Martha Stoddard Holmes Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 2004 |
Häufige Begriffe und Wortgruppen
ability adult afflicted child articulates asserts autobiography beggars begging impostor Bertha biography blind woman Blyth body century charity Collins's concept constructed context courtship Craik crippled critical Dartmouth Medical School deaf dependent desire deux orphelines Dickens Dickens's Dinah Craik disabled characters disabled women discourse discussion disease effect Elizabeth Gilbert emotional excess emotionally Ermine Ermine's example experience eyes fact feelings fiction figure friends gender Gilbert Harriet Martineau Henry Fawcett heroine Hide and Seek identity imagine innocent interviewees Jenny Kitto literary lives London Labour Lucilla Madonna Madonna Blyth marriage plot marry Martin Martineau Mayhew melo melodrama moral mother narrative nineteenth-century nondisabled novel Nydia pain pathos person physical impairment physically disabled Pompeii Poor Law Poor Miss Finch popular produced reader reformers relationships role seems sexuality sight Smike social story street-sellers suffering suggests sympathy Tackleton texts Tiny Tim tion Victorian culture Victorian literature Wilkie Collins workhouse writing
Beliebte Passagen
Seite 33 - Thus with the year Seasons return ; but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine ; But cloud instead, and everduring dark Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair Presented with a universal blank Of nature's works, to me expunged and rased, And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
Seite 102 - Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together ; there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring...
Seite 102 - and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.
Seite 101 - As the person who is principally interested in any event is pleased with our sympathy, and hurt by the want of it, so we, too, seem to be pleased when we are able to sympathize with him, and to be hurt when we are unable to do so. We run not only to congratulate the successful, but to condole with the afflicted; and the pleasure which we find in the conversation of one whom in all the passions of his heart we can entirely sympathize with, seems to do more than compensate the painfulness of that sorrow...
Seite 6 - God bless us every one!' said Tiny Tim, the last of all. He sat very close to his father's side upon his little stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him. 'Spirit,' said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, 'tell me if Tiny Tim will live.
Seite x - This world's no blot for us, Nor blank; it means intensely and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink.
Seite 166 - ... not the time appointed for the operation. But on passing from the street into the yard, with a load of slates which I was to take to the house-top, my attention was drawn to a stream of blood, or rather, I suppose, bloody water, flowing through the gutter by which the passage was traversed. The idea that this was the blood of the dead youth, whom I had so lately seen alive, and that the doctors were then at work cutting him up and groping at his inside, made me shudder, and gave what I should...
Seite 96 - ... persistent in its hold on the reader's curiosity — a curiosity amounting, in the case of its younger and more impressible readers, to absolute anxiety. But, good as it is, this book is the first among many examples of the too undeniable and characteristic fact that the remarkable genius of its author for invention and construction and composition of incidents and effects was limited by an incapacity and dependent on a condition which cannot but be regarded as seriously impairing his claims...
Seite 166 - I cannot but think it was owing to this that I lost much of the presence of mind and collectedness so important to me at that moment ; for when I had ascended to the top of the ladder, and was in the critical act of stepping from it on to the roof, I lost my footing, and fell backward, from a height of about thirty-five feet, into the paved court below.
Seite 70 - I cannot think, however, that the police exercise a wise discretion in permitting some of the more hideous of these beggars to infest the streets. Instances are on record of nervous females having been seriously frightened, and even injured, by seeing men without legs or arms crawling at their feet. A case is within my own knowledge, where the sight of a man without legs or arms had such an effect upon a lady in the family way that her child was born in all respects the very counterpart of the object...
Verweise auf dieses Buch
Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins Maria K. Bachman,Don Richard Cox Eingeschränkte Leseprobe - 2003 |