Monstrous Kinds
Subtitle: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: Jan 04, 2019
Language: eng
Format: hardcover
Number of pages: 284
ISBN-13: 9780472131129
Description: 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.
Notes: Source title: Monstrous Kinds: Body, Space, and Narrative in Renaissance Representations of Disability (Corporealities: Discourses Of Disability)