Literary and theoretical texts for all your Disability Studies needs.
Primary Literary Texts
Erewhon, by Samuel Butler (1872)
Basically, Butler's Erewhon is about all things Victorian, but what's most important for our purposes is the way sickness is treated in the novel. What's happening in the story is essentially that...
The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells (1896)
The Island of Dr. Moreau is pretty much Planet of the Apes on steroids. In a nutshell, the book is about a young man who is shipwrecked on a desert island (but Gilligan's Island t...
Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D. H. Lawrence (1928)
Okay. Let's face it: a book like Lady Chatterley's Lover sounds like something you'd find in a 12-year-old's sock drawer just so that they can read about sex. And, yeah, it's made more than a...
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley (1932)
We really don't think that Aldous Huxley had a crystal ball and could look into the future and see our modern world of prenatal genetic testing. But reading Brave New World sure makes us wond...
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby (1998)
Bauby's memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, isn't a Gothic novel, like most of the ones we've discussed so far, but those who haven't yet read the book would probably expect it to be.The bo...
Primary Theoretical Texts
Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture, by James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson (2001)
This collection is sort of the Superman of studies—relating disability to the material world around us and showing us, specifically, how this clash of bodies and space shapes the way that we unde...
Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing, by G. Thomas Couser (2003)
No doubt about it. Couser is awesome. In his book, Vulnerable Subjects, he cautions us against buying too readily into all those feel-good stories that are becoming so popular nowadays.You know t...
Disability/Postmodernism, by Tom Shakespeare and Mairian Corker (2002)
Shakespeare and Corker take the postmodern ideas of someone like Donna Haraway in her "Cyborg Manifesto" and apply them to disability in such a way that it makes the possibilities for all bodiesâ€...
Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, by Lennard Davis (1995)
In this important work, Davis builds upon his theories of the ways that our modern concepts of the "norm" and the "normal" emerged, arguing that at the heart of these ideas is an attempt to constru...
Staring: How We Look, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2009)
Yup, here she is again—our good old RGT. And in Staring, RGT builds on the theories she has cultivated in her early career to explore the human impulse to look and then to explain what we see....