Experiencing the Craft and Ethical Impact of Young Adult Disability Fiction

Abstract

Scholars like Ria Cheyne and Sami Schalk have argued that the imaginative and ethical structures of fiction can, if effectively leveraged, provide readers a new orientation to, or understanding of, difference. Advancing recent work that identifies methods to assess the material reception of disability literature, the article demonstrates how general audiences perceive both the craft and ethical import of fiction. Beverly Butler’s 1962 novel Light a Single Candle is one example of young adult literature that has resonated with audiences over time. Literary disability studies and narrative theory clarify the range of storytelling techniques that make the novel compelling: Butler, a blind author herself, carefully creates distances among reader, narrator, and character only to close them; she uses the physical description of blind modality to represent social experience; and she installs characters that model different disability ethics. Systematically analyzing the novel’s online reviews, the article shows that audiences sense Butler’s storytelling techniques in ways that open up spaces for mindful reflection on the nature of impairment and the construction of disability.