Chapter 18 - Re-framing and Re-forming Disability and Literature

Summary

This chapter examines the representation of illness and impairment in various works of fiction, poetry, and memoir to demonstrate the creative possibilities of disability. Where literary uses of disability have historically been thought to denote suffering, corruption, social failure, or inspirational and redemptive lessons aimed at non-disabled readers, recent scholarship has explored disability’s generative relation to structures of plot and to poetics as well as its epistemological effects, constituting new forms of knowledge. The chapter spotlights three texts that explicitly challenge tropes of deviance and lack and foreground bodymind anomalousness as the source of creative expression and knowing.