Abstract
The chapter establishes the intersection of disability and class through an analysis of two autobiographies of vision impairment and the history of blind workers in Ireland. The chapter also traces the persistence of infectious trachoma and its association with famine, poverty, and colonial warfare, discovering in Sean O’Casey’s 1939 childhood memoir an interrogation of the political dimensions of his vision impairment. Fifty years later, Joe Bollard’s 1998 autobiography describes his struggle against what he defines as an underclass mentality of submission, as well as the discrimination that proved a more formidable impediment than blindness. Both works highlight problems of labor and the often harmful impact of institutions that were originally established for altruistic ends.
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Grubgeld, E. (2020). Disability and Class: Blindness and Labor in Post-independence Ireland. In: Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37246-0_2
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