Title: Monstrous kinds : body, space, and narrative in Renaissance representations of disability /
Authors: Bearden, Elizabeth B., 1975-
Year: 2019
Subjects: Disabilities in literature; European literature History and criticism.; Disabilities in literature.; European literature Renaissance
Abstract: Monstrous Kinds is the first book to explore textual representations of disability in the global Renaissance. Elizabeth B. Bearden contends that monstrosity, as a precursor to modern concepts of disability, has much to teach about our tendency to inscribe disability with meaning. Understanding how early modern writers approached disability not only provides more accurate genealogies of disability, but also helps nuance current aesthetic and theoretical disability formulations. The book analyzes the cultural valences of early modern disability across a broad national and chronological span, attending to the specific bodily, spatial, and aesthetic systems that contributed to early modern literary representations of disability. The cross section of texts (including conduct books and treatises, travel writing and wonder books) is comparative, putting canonical European authors such as Castiglione into dialogue with transatlantic and Anglo-Ottoman literary exchange. Bearden questions grand narratives that convey a progression of disability from supernatural marvel to medical specimen, suggesting that, instead, these categories coexist and intersect.
Contents: Introduction -- The Ideal Monster: Disability, Courtliness, and Civilizing Body Talk -- Before Normal, There Was Natural: John Bulwer, Disability, and Natural Signing in England and Beyond -- Moctezuma's Zoo or Cortés's Courtiers: Geographies of Disability in Mexica and European Courts -- "Signing in the Seraglio": Global Disability in European Travel Accounts of the Ottoman Court -- "Unnaturall Order": Conjoined Twins and Monstrous Narration in the Wonder Book.