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Examines the significance of disability in nineteenth-century fiction
This book takes an exciting new approach to characterisation and plot in the Victorian novel, examining the vital narrative work performed by disabled characters, and demonstrating how attention to disability sheds new light on these texts' arrangement and use of bodies. It also argues that the representation of the disabled body shaped and signalled different generic traditions in nineteenth-century fiction. This wide-ranging study offers new readings of major authors including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot and Henry James, as well as exploring lesser known writers such as Charlotte M. Yonge and Dinah Mulock Craik.
Clare Walker Gore is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. A Possible Person?: Marking the Minor Character in Dickens
2. At the Margins of Mystery: Sensational Difference in Wilkie Collins
3. (De)Forming Families: Disability and the Marriage Plot in Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge
4. Terminal Decline: Physical Frailty and Moral Inheritance in George Eliot and Henry James
Coda
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Clare Walker Gore is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. She has authored 'The Additional Attraction of Affliction: Disability, Sex and Genre Trouble in Barchester Towers', Victorian Literature and Culture 45.3 (August 2017), 629-643 and 'Noble Lives: Writing Masculinity and Disability in the Late Nineteenth Century', Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36.4 (September 2014), 363-375.
