Disability Literature Research Articles

Gender and Disability in Literature

Literature is something which transfers the thoughts and prespectives of the author to the readers and thus results the success of any literary work on the other hand it reflects the society. This paper describes the differences which is prevailing among the human community that has the power to destroy them too. Disability, is the physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements,senses or activities. Though the people live together they are strongly rooted with their differences. Both Gender and disability has ruined the dreams of many achievers and there are few who have over came all those in the journey towards their goals.

It’s All in the Plan: A Document Analysis of Victorian Council and Public Library Disability Access and Inclusion Plans

ABSTRACTThe Victorian Government requires councils to create a disability action plan or discuss inclusion in their council plan. Disability action plans aim to reduce barriers in accessing goods, services or facilities and to reduce discrimination. With public libraries in Victoria being managed by councils either individually or in a corporation, these action plans have the potential to directly impact on the community via library services. Using qualitative and quantitative document analysis, a total of 31 Victorian councils or library corporation disability action plans were analysed to understand what these plans saw as the action areas for libraries working with people with a disability. It was found that definitions of disability in these action plans broadly matched with the wider disability and libraries literature, with most councils in Victoria having an online action plan but comparatively few library corporations having the same. Libraries were largely discussed in relation to six theme areas (Access; Certification; Collections; Programming; Technology; and Training). An overall summary indicates that libraries involvement in council disability action plans is less detailed than in some library corporation action plans.

Route Learning by Blind and Partially Sighted People

The paper aims to fill an important gap in the literature by reporting on blind and partially sighted people's route-learning experiences and strategies from their perspective. The existing literature has largely reported the results of experiments in indoor and outdoor, often artificially created, environments rather than real experiences of travel and route learning. The results presented here were obtained from semi-structured interviews with 100 blind and partially sighted people in five different countries. They show that they prefer to keep to known routes where possible, in line with the literature, but do not wish to be restricted to them. The paper discusses the conditions in which they consider it worth learning new routes and the strategies they use to do this. The paper is interpreted in a theoretical framework of independence, autonomy, and self-determination, understood, in line with the disability literature, as making choices and decisions and having control rather than necessarily doing everything oneself. A further contribution is a confirmation of the role of the (greater) memory of blind people in travel and a suggestion that the ability to develop memory may affect differences in travel skills. The paper concludes with several recommendations, including for further research.

Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability by Genevieve Love

Reviewed by: Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability by Genevieve Love Lauren Coker Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability. By Genevieve Love. Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2019. Cloth $110.00, Paper $29.95. 212 pages. Genevieve Love's Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability offers a timely contribution to burgeoning conversations in early modern literary disability studies. Love acknowledges recent work on early modern disability, citing, for instance, Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood's 2013 collection Recovering Disability in Early Modern England. However, her book departs from these works insofar as she is less concerned with the social construction of disability and more focused on disabled characters serving as meta-representational figures for theatricality, competing play texts, and historical movements. In this vein, Love's opening, "Introduction: Disability and/as theatricality," outlines a two-fold structure for the book instead of establishing an argument. The initial two chapters explore theatrical representation, while the latter two highlight issues of theatrical interpretation from text to the stage via depictions of physical disability, which Love deems a type of "theatrical meaning-making" (10). At first blush, the book's scope may seem ambitious; yet its four chapters and brief afterword posit how the prosthetic body can be interpreted—through metaphor and staged embodiment—in the early modern English theatre. The first chapter, "The Work of Standing and of Standing-For: Disability, Movement, Theatrical Personation in The Fair Maid of the Exchange," offers a compelling close reading of the anonymous play's central character, Cripple, and his reliance on crutches as prosthetic devices. In this chapter, Love calls readers' attention to the vexed verbs attached to Cripple—such as "stand" and "mount"—in that they ironically enable a character who epitomizes disability. Love teases out Cripple's character further, arguing that he becomes a meta-reflection of the play itself, and claiming, "Cripple is in the play because the play is a cripple" (55). In other words, for Love, the character embodies the play itself. Love also contends that an attempt to perform disability on stage extends to a larger problem of theatricality when an actor confronts a role, and Cripple's character elucidates this "refusal of likeness" in the impossibility of exact imitation (58). Indeed, theatre history and performance studies scholars may show particular interest in this chapter's consideration of staged attempts to embody Cripple, who demonstrates "prosthetic disabled embodiment" and thereby shows no discomfort with his crutches (68). Disability studies scholars and advocates frequently criticize stage and screen performances of disability in which actors and characters treat prostheses as burdensome accessories; Cripple, Love intimates, appropriates his crutches with ease. Chapter 2, "The Sound of Prosthetic Movement: Transnational and Temporal Analogy in A Larum for London," turns its focus toward the anonymously-authored [End Page 162] play's amputee soldier Stump, who relies on a wooden leg prosthetic. This chapter builds on existing scholarship that reads the play through historical and national lenses while emphasizing Stump's disabled identity. Love claims that Stump's name and prosthesis work as a symbolic link on stage between past and present and between geographic locations. Specifically, Love reads Stump's physicality as the metaphorical representation of the fluid relationship between the English and Dutch. This claim is fleshed out through another close reading—this time of the play's use of sound and motion, as well as thoughtful examination of the various denotations of "stump." The penultimate chapter, "'Faustus Has His Legge Again': Truncation and Prosthesis, Theatricality, and Bibliography in Doctor Faustus," addresses competing textual versions of Christopher Marlowe's play, underscoring scenes featuring decapitation and amputation discrepancies. Love proposes another meta-connection between the Doctor Faustus scenes and differing versions of the play text, claiming, "the recapitulation of theatrical figures of disability in biographical and critical discourse" are analogous (104). Indeed, conflicting moments of "dismemberment" in various versions of the play serve as metaphors for textual fragmentation in bibliographic studies. Love's final and arguably strongest chapter, "Richard's 'Giddy Footing': Degree of Difference and Cyclical Movement in Shakespeare's Richard III," offers a refreshing take on the much-studied historical-figure-turned-Shakespeare-villain with ambiguous...

Caring for People with Disabilities: An Ethics of Respect.

Eva Feder Kittay's Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds is poised to make a major contribution to the disability literature and is likely to spark controversy among disability scholars. The book's central contribution is the articulation of an ethics of care for meeting the "genuine needs" and "legitimate wants" of people with disabilities or chronic illnesses. We applaud Kittay, who is the mother of a woman with cerebral palsy who has multiple physical and intellectual impairments, for sharing her story in such an eloquent, accessible, and personal manner. The question remains, however, as to whether Kittay's normative theory of care captures the ethical obligations that should exist between the carer and the cared-for. In demanding that the cared-for include the carer as a participant in all their interactions with others, Kittay conceptualizes what paid caregiving relationships should look like in a way we find misguided.

Rural–urban patterns of disability: The role of migration

AbstractDisability rates are higher in rural than in urban areas of the United States, raising the question: do residential preferences and selective migration of people with disabilities play a role in higher rural disability rates? Utilising concepts of environmental fit from the disability literature and ideas from classic, residential preference, and household migration studies, we examine the 2011–2015 American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample to understand whether migration contributes to higher rural disability. Results show only slightly different propensities to stay in rural than in urban areas and similar destination choices of people with or without disability, suggesting that migration does little to explain higher rates of rural disability. However, we detect noteworthy differences in age migration schedules for persons with disability, persons without disability in households with disability, and persons without disability in households without disability. Disability emerges as a relevant, although underresearched, dimension in household migration research.

Mastery and Belonging or Inspiration Porn and Bullying: Special Populations in Youth Sport

This paper examines the factors that make up a high-quality youth-sport experience for special-population children. It is important to note that special-population youth are often very similar to nondisabled children (e.g., seeking enjoyment in sport), but they experience different contexts and socialization experiences such as fewer opportunities and more barriers to sport participation. The author first examines positive factors in the youth-sport experience and discusses mastery experiences and the generation of positive affect. He also discusses how sport can promote feelings of belongingness, freedom, and independence. In the second part of the paper he discusses how the youth-sport experience can contribute to a negative experience by examining bullying and teasing, as well as “inspiration porn.” Inspiration porn is a relatively new concept in the disability literature that has not been discussed in a sport context. The author proposes a five-component model that links anecdotal reports of inspiration porn to theory, thus providing a basis for future research on inspiration porn. Throughout the paper he examines research in each area, theories used, important findings, salient take-home points, and future research directions and imbues the paper in a disability social-relational model that asserts that individual, social, environmental, and cultural factors all play a role as proximal and distal influences in the sport experiences of special-population youth.

Potrayal of Disable Characters in English Literature - A Study of Disability Literature

Potrayal of Disable Characters in English Literature - A Study of Disability Literature

Narrating Disability in Literature and Visual Media: Introduction

AbstractThis 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.

문학적 장애 재현이 창출하는 공감과 연대 - 샤이니 무투(Shani Mootoo)의 장편소설 『밤에 피는 선인장 꽃』(Cereus Blooms ar Night)을 중심으로 -

문학적 장애 재현이 창출하는 공감과 연대 - 샤이니 무투(Shani Mootoo)의 장편소설 『밤에 피는 선인장 꽃』(Cereus Blooms ar Night)을 중심으로 -

The New Normal: Enfreakment in Saga

This article draws on the award-winning fantasy comic <em>Saga</em> (Vaughan and Staples 2012–present), in order to explore how it portrays bodily difference as the norm, presenting to us a fantasy reality that nevertheless uncannily parallels ours in many ways. If ‘enfreakment’ is the creation of the freak, the article argues that the comic achieves something that might be termed ‘dis-enfreakment’. This article is mainly grounded in literary disability studies, drawing upon the work by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and others. The article explores how <em>Saga</em> portrays racism, miscegenation, and homosexuality. The basic argument is that, through the presentation of a variety of races and species of life, <em>Saga</em> deliberately questions the very idea of ‘normal’ by presenting many co-existing forms of normalcy.

Idiocy and Object-Attentive Reading in The Sound and the Fury.

This essay reconsiders the representation of cognitive disability in literature, suggesting a new mode of reading in which the disabled character is viewed as a dynamic figure with an identity, and corresponding set of formal implications, that the reader comes to know over the progression of the story. Focusing on Benjy's section in The Sound and the Fury, I examine the specific disabled modality by which Faulkner's narrator organizes the world: object attention. Benjy uses objects to constellate his experiences, and a latent pattern of object deployment undergirds the narrative. As Benjy "tries to say" his story, he crafts a narrative that generates from his object attachments, allowing readers to make sense of his experience in a novel form-if we only try to see it. My analysis suggests that the appeal of fiction about cognitive disability lies not in confronting some fundamental inaccessibility of the disabled subject or the world he inhabits, but in wrestling with the strictures of a text's accessibility so that the subject or world might come to be known.

How does employment influence health outcomes? A systematic review of the intellectual disability literature

How does employment influence health outcomes? A systematic review of the intellectual disability literature

Rehabilitation as a Disability Equality Issue: A Conceptual Shift for Disability Studies?

Rehabilitation is a controversial subject in disability studies, often discussed in terms of oppression, normalisation, and unwanted intrusion. While there may be good reasons for positioning rehabilitation in this way, this has also meant that, as a lived experience, it is under-researched and neglected in disabilities literature, as we show by surveying leading disability studies journals. With some notable exceptions, rehabilitation research has remained the preserve of the rehabilitation sciences, and such studies have rarely included the voices of disabled people themselves, as we also demonstrate by surveying a cross-section of rehabilitation science literature. Next, drawing on new research, we argue for reframing access to rehabilitation as a disability equality issue. Through in-depth discussion of two case studies, we demonstrate that rehabilitation can be a tool for inclusion and for supporting an equal life. Indeed, we contend that rehabilitation merits disability researchers’ sustained engagement, precisely to ensure that a ‘right-based rehabilitation’ policy and practice can be developed, which is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; oppressive, but reflects the views and experiences of the disabled people who rehabilitation should serve.

Abstract P109: Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Post-Stroke Disability: A Focus on Outcome Measures

Background and Purpose: Several studies suggest that racial/ethnic minority groups experience worse disability across the course of stroke recovery. However, there is little consistency in the measurement of stroke outcomes, which may contribute to some inconclusive evidence of racial/ethnic disparities in post-stroke disability. The objective of the current review is to examine how stroke outcomes are measured to identify racial/ethnic disparities in disability and functioning among stroke survivors in the US. Methods: A review of the literature was conducted to identify outcome measures used in racial/ethnic disparities in post-stroke disability literature, use the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) model as a frame of reference for mapping the contents of the identified measures, and evaluate the time points of measured outcomes and racial/ethnic representation. Articles published between January 2001 and July 2017 were identified with our search criteria through Scopus, PubMed, CINAHL, and PsycINFO according to predefined inclusion criteria. Results: One hundred and ninety-four articles met inclusion criteria for full-text review and 41 articles were included in the final review. Although we found evidence of outcome measure content aligning with all ICF domains, little research has examined contextual factors in post-stroke disability disparities research. Additionally, we discovered the outcome measures are conducted across stroke recovery trajectories including pre-stroke, acute stroke, early recovery (≤90 days), and long-term (&gt;90 days) but little consistency in outcome measure use was discovered. African American and Hispanic populations were assessed most frequently and minimal studies examined disparities among other minority populations comprising the US (i.e., Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native). Conclusions: A variety of outcome measures have been used to assess disparities in disability across the course of stroke recovery. Yet, the lack of consistency in what outcomes are measured and when specific outcomes are assessed may contribute to mixed findings in the racial/ethnic disparities literature. Additional concerns include the lack of evidence on validity of outcome measures among racial/ethnic minority populations, the lack of representation among all racial/ethnic populations comprising the US, and minimal emphasis placed on the disparities in personal and environmental factors that contribute to disability. This review sheds light on the need for additional disparities in post-stroke disability research focusing on contextual factors and greater representation among less studied populations in the US.

Indigenous Australians, Intellectual Disability and Incarceration: A Confluence of Rights Violations

Abstract: This article reviews the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians with intellectual disability in the Australian prison system through a human rights lens. There is an information gap on this group of Australian prisoners in the health and disability literature and the multi-disciplinary criminal law and human rights law literature. This article will consider the context of Indigenous imprisonment in Australia and examine the status of prisoner health in that country, as well as the status of the health and wellbeing of prisoners with intellectual disability. It will then specifically explore the health, wellbeing and impact of imprisonment on Indigenous Australians with intellectual disability, and highlight how intersectional rights deficits (including health and human rights deficits) causally impact the ability of Indigenous Australians with intellectual disability to access due process, equal recognition and justice in the criminal justice and prison system. A central barrier to improving intersectional and discriminatory landscapes relating to health, human rights and justice for Indigenous Australian inmates with intellectual disability, and prisoners with intellectual disability more broadly in the Australian context, is the lack of sufficient governance and accountability mechanisms (including Indigenous-led mechanisms) to enforce the operationalisation of consistent, transparent, culturally responsive, rights-based remedies.

Introduction to Special Issue: Null Effects and Publication Bias in Learning Disabilities Research

AbstractThe importance of publishing studies with null findings to the scientific enterprise is garnering attention in social science at large and education in particular. In this article, we first define null findings and publication bias as they relate to group and single‐subject instructional intervention research. We then explore the prevalence of instructional intervention studies that report null findings in the learning disabilities literature. Overall, we found that few studies have been published in learning disability journals that reported all null results. However, a significant number of group studies reported mixed findings (i.e., at least one, but not all, outcome measures were not statistically significant). Next, we summarize the experimental studies that comprise this special issue on null findings. Last, we speculate regarding strategies that might be enacted to increase the publication of studies with null findings in the learning disabilities field.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability eds. by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability eds. by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray Clare Mullaney BARKER, CLARE, and STUART MURRAY, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 254 pp. $84.99 hardcover; $21.75 paperback; $14.60 Kindle. The Cambridge Companion to Disability and Literature, edited by Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, offers a much-needed introduction to the thriving field of literary disability studies, which emerged as an academic discipline in the late 1990s following its origins in the social sciences. Each of the volume's carefully crafted essays will appeal to a broad audience, benefiting both undergraduate students and advanced literary scholars looking for a comprehensive primer to disability studies and, more specifically, representations of disability in literature. In their introduction to the Companion, Clare Barker and Stuart Murray suggest that the problem with disability is not that it is absent from literature but "that it is frequently not seen" (2). They continue, "That this is the case is.…less to do with the texts themselves than the reading practices that have been brought to them. Precisely because disability appears to signal the possibility of so many connections to other topics, it can easily be lost or subsumed in what are presumed to be more 'important' (and nearly always nondisabled) questions" (2). Literary scholars are trained to understand disability as symbolic; "actual disabilities seem clearly less important than the function they serve to underscore," whether it be sentiment, abjection, villainy, or heroism. Each of the Companion's essays models how to read for disability as what Ellen Samuels calls "actual realities" and considers how representations of the lived, material experience of impairment challenge conventional literary forms and their accompanying modes of analysis (qtd. in Companion 10). The Companion is divided into two parts. The book's first half features eight essays, which track a historical genealogy of disability representations, moving chronologically from medieval to contemporary literature. Edward Wheatly suggests that medieval writing illustrates what he calls the "religious model of disability" whereby impairment is a result of "divine punishment for sinful behavior" and cure was understood as religious rather than medical (18, 19). Alison Hobgood and David Wood turn to early modern humoral theory to show how an anonymous Renaissance play, Looke about You, casts emotional deviance as a productive and even desirable aesthetic. Like Hobgood and Wood, Essaka Joshua suggests that "deformity" in the eighteenth century was, as in Frances Burney's Camilla (1796), an affirmative, aesthetic category that predates "disability" (47). Despite the rise of medicalization in the nineteenth century, Martha Stoddard Holmes argues that stereotypical representations of "afflicted" and "defective" characters like Charles Dickens's tragic Tiny Tim are ripe [End Page 299] for understanding disability as a social category because they are positioned in relation to kinship and labor. Michael Davidson asserts that modernist literature predominantly "feature[s] disease or disability as a figure for social upheavals and cultural malaise" to buffer ideals of "the statistically normal body" (74, 85). While we might assume that contemporary literature offers more nuanced representations of disability, Stuart Murray posits that post-1945 novels waffle between problematic depictions of impairment as sentimental and melodramatic, and subversions of these stereotypical representations in narratives like Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). In her essay on postcolonial fiction, Barker discusses how representations of "affliction" and their association with muteness are "direct consequences of colonization," and, although they rely on metaphor, she suggests that they also trouble "widely accepted ideas about the body, health, ability, and healing" (105, 111). The second section of the Companion considers disability studies' critical methodological investments and their overlap with intersecting minority fields of study. Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim's essay on disability and intersectionality turns to Audre Lorde's work in the 1980s to advocate for neither the inclusion nor the replacement of "disability" among a range of other identities but for consideration of intersecting "systems and structures of oppression" (129). Looking specifically at the overlap between crip and queer identities, Robert McRuer examines a range of literary, visual, and cultural...

Closing the Capacity-Ability Gap: Using Technology to Support Aging With Disability.

There is a critical need to develop supports for older adults who have a wide range of abilities, including those aging with long-term impairments. Without appropriate support, many individuals will be functioning below optimal levels and will face participation barriers. Technology holds great promise to provide individualized support for a wide range of abilities and for a variety of domains. To ensure technology interventions are designed well and meet research-documented user requirements, we need more specific, actionable models to provide guidance for those developing and designing interventions. In this paper, we present the TechSAge Aging and Disability Model to bridge models from the aging and disability literatures and to disambiguate the population of individuals aging into disability from those aging with disability (i.e., pre-existing impairments). We also present the TechSAge Technology Intervention Model to support aging with pre-existing impairments, which provides direction and touch points for technology interventions. These models reflect the complex and dynamic interaction between age-related changes and an individual’s prior capabilities and limitations. We describe the need for these models with respect to filling a gap in the disability and aging literature by highlighting the importance of differentiating between age-related changes and long-term impairments when designing interventions. We also show the need for quantitative and qualitative data to refine the models given complexities of the current state of the literature and survey data. The TechSAge Technology Intervention Model can be used to drive and inform technology redesign and development.

Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature by Maren Tova Linett

Reviewed by: Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature by Maren Tova Linett Tammy Berberi Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature. Maren Tova Linett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Pp. 257. $34.95 (paper); $34.95 (eBook). What are the stakes of literary encounters with physical difference? Michael Davidson notes that “[A] poetics—as much as a politics—of disability is important: because it theorizes the ways that poetry defamiliarizes not only language but the body normalized within language.”1 Literary disability studies discovers meanings that accrue to disabled bodies and how these meanings inflect the trajectory of a narrative and catalyze artistic praxis, foregrounding discursive norms of embodiment as well as departures from them. Disability studies pairs particularly well [End Page 212] with modernism thanks to a shared commitment to articulating as inherently worthy of analysis how individuals experience themselves and others in the world. In exploring the role of disabilities in shaping modernism, Linett complicates an ethics of recognition. As formulated by Hegel, the modern subject is constituted through an intrinsic duality of consciousness: the idealization of an independent and autonomous self and, simultaneously, the awareness that this self is contingent upon experience among others. This inherent duality cannot be reconciled and results in asymmetrical recognition and subordination. The misrecognition of disabled subjects is foundational to understanding both poetics and politics. Linett writes: “I view ableism not exclusively as the disparagement or dehumanization of disabled people, but also as the conviction that disabled people are radically other, that their disabilities, whether congenital or acquired, change them in ways that create a gulf between ‘them’ and able-bodied ‘us’” (7). Bodies of Modernism is a wide-ranging, capacious, and meticulously researched study spanning 1890 to 1940, exploring modernist prose by more than a dozen writers: 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 L. Barclay, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Unsurprisingly, several of these writers lived with disabilities, yet the book’s primary interest lies in the textual bodies embedded within modernist culture and texts, or “how literary depictions of disabled characters help shape cultural ideas (however inaccurate) about how impairments influence subjectivities” (3). Linett’s astute readings rely upon the juxtaposition of a wide array of texts and a continual effort to lay bare both the eugenic and counternormative forces at work in a text. In several instances, Linett’s analyses draw upon the evolution of manuscript versions. The result is a rather prodigious contribution to modernist and disability studies. While modernist writers were exploring the role of the body in shaping ways of knowing and experiencing the world, eugenic science and its popularization resulted in pervasive discrimination against people with disabilities. In “These Pushful Days,” Douglas Baynton takes stock of its impact: sign language was prohibited in classrooms at schools for the deaf, and deaf people were expected to learn to speak. City ordinances targeting people with visible disabilities proscribed begging; infants with disabilities were commonly euthanized; children and adults with disabilities were sterilized, segregated, and isolated (Linett, 13). These practices arose as a result of the homogenization of time and timing: those who were unable to keep up were viewed as a drag on scientific, social, and evolutionary progress. Yet alongside what was arguably a hypervisibility of people with disabilities as constructed through eugenic discourse emerged a salient reevaluation of vision as the sine qua non of perception and knowledge. Technologies such as cinema, the telescope, and x-ray, as well as Freudian psychoanalysis, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Bergson’s formulation of la durée contributed to distrust of ocularcentric epistemologies. Bodies of Modernism explores a cultural matrix in which physical capacities were interpreted in order to discredit a person’s humanity and to foreground modernist experimentation and praxis. As Linett demonstrates, these cultural registers often operate simultaneously in modernist texts. A valuation of perspective and subjectivity facilitated the inward turn of modernism and rendered obsolete the reflexive, universalizing pathos of Victorian depictions of disability. In their place, modernist texts staged individual responses to disabled characters who posit disability “not...