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Disabling Romanticism

Part of the book series: Literary Disability Studies ((LIDIST))

Abstract

Disabling Romanticism is the first collection of essays on the Romantic period to foreground the complex theme of disability. Our title suggests not only that Romantic studies should be revisited in the light of contemporary disability awareness, but also that dominant critical practices associated with Romantic studies continue to marginalise and disable the different in body and mind. ‘Disabling’ Romanticism will involve interrogating certain traditions of interpretation which have accumulated around Romantic texts and authors, countering normative discourses by promoting difference, and revealing the ideologies that support able-bodied and able-minded privilege. The self-reflexive quality of much Romantic literature is conducive to symbolic appropriation; it will be the work of an approach informed by critical disability studies to question, challenge, deactivate, and reactivate some of these readings by bringing them into contact with historical lived experience and with the histories and evolution of concepts of disability. A ‘disabling’ of a Romantic text is a new reading, but can also be a form of un-reading. This is not to dismiss other approaches, but to argue for the integration of the disability studies perspective with them.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK

    Michael Bradshaw

  2. University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, USA

    Essaka Joshua

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  1. Michael Bradshaw
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  1. Edge Hill University, Lancashire, UK

    Michael Bradshaw

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Bradshaw, M., Joshua, E. (2016). Introduction. In: Bradshaw, M. (eds) Disabling Romanticism. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46064-6_1

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