Articulating Bodies

The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction

Kylee-Anne Hingston

Liverpool University Press

Representations Health Disability Culture and Society LUP

Narratological approach that offers a close reading of narrative structure, investigating both the macro and the micro of narrative representations of disability in a way not done before
By considering the textual construction of corporeality rather than centering in on bodies now considered disabled or on a single kind of disability, Articulating Bodies accommodates the fluidity of Victorian body categorization
Unique breadth of appeal as this work contributes to the fields of Victorian studies, genre studies, disability studies, medical humanities, and narratological studies
Potential teaching resource due to its original approach to canonical texts such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Articulating Bodies

The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction

Kylee-Anne Hingston

Liverpool University Press

Representations Health Disability Culture and Society LUP

Description

Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability's medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and body. The book examines texts from across the century, from Frederic Shoberl's 1833 English translation of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (1893), covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades of the nineteenth century and across six genres, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout the Victorian era, authors of fiction used narrative form as well as narrative theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality. As fiction's form developed from the massive hybrid novels of the early decades of the nineteenth century to the case-study length of fin-de-siècle mysteries, disability became increasingly medicalized, moving from the position of spectacle to specimen.