Disability Studies and the British Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Disability studies approaches the British eighteenth century as a period in transition, with the conception of disability as spiritual sign of wonder or warning giving way to an understanding of it as pathology and abnormality. Period-appropriate terms for disability are ‘deformity,’‘defect,’ and ‘monster,’ which were used for exotic bodily configurations and gender and racial differences: women and non-Europeans were perceived as defective. John Milton, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Inchbald, and William Hay have generated interest on account of their disabilities, while Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, Mary Wortley Montagu, Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding, Henry Fielding, John Cleland, Francis Burney, and William Godwin have received attention for disability thematics. Topics of concern include disability and old age, physiognomy in characterization, joke book humor and sensibility, ugliness as aesthetic category, defect in tropes of national identity, deafness and sign language, intellectual disability and Lockean epistemology, the exotic deformed, disfigurement from smallpox as well as political rhetoric associated with the disease, and femininity as monstrosity.