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Author:

Stoddard Holmes, Martha.

Title:

Fictions of affliction : physical disability in Victorian culture / Martha Stoddard Holmes.

Edition:

1st pbk. ed.

Publisher:

University of Michigan Press,

Copyright Date:

2009

Description:

xiv, 228 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Subject:

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.
People with disabilities in literature.
People with disabilities--Great Britain--History--19th century.
Great Britain--Civilization--19th century.

Notes:

Originally published 2004. Includes bibliographical references (p. 211-221) and index.

Contents:

Melodramatic bodies -- Marital melodramas : disabled women and Victorian marriage plots -- "My old delightful sensation" : Wilkie Collins and the disabling of melodrama -- An object for compassion, an enemy to the state : imagining disabled boys and men -- Melodramas of the self : auto/biographies of Victorians with physical disabilities.

Summary:

"We all know Tiny Tim, that familiar Victorian figure of infirmity, sentimentality, and charity: why do so many of the most memorable fiction characters in nineteenth-century British literature have disabilities? What did physical disability mean to people in Victorian Britain - and what can that meaning teach us about Victorian culture? In Fictions of Affliction, Martha Stoddard Holmes seeks to answer these questions by investigating works of drama and fiction and other writing of the period, including the personal testimony of Victorians with disabilities. Holmes finds that melodramatic representations of disability pervaded not only novels by Dickens, but also doctors' treatises on blindness, educators' arguments for "special" education, and even the writing of disabled people themselves."--Jacket.

Series:

Corporealities

ISBN:

9780472068418
0472068415

OCLC:

(OCoLC)759584109

Locations:

PRAX771 -- Cowles Library (Des Moines)