The idea of disability in the eighteenth century / edited by Chris Mounsey.

Date:
[2014]
  • Books

About this work

Description

"The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century explores the intersections between the ways disabled people were and are understood in history. It presents a new analysis of disability as an alternative to the foucauldian, called Variability, which is consciously historicist and centers on the individual as "the same only different" from the non-disabled. The essays in this collection examine Variability in three ways: philosophically (Margaret Cavendish, John Locke, Lord Shaftesbury, and Thomas Reid), conceptually (in the novel, personal statements, and journalism) and experientially (writer's biographies), and together demonstrate that disability was an active organizing principle of eighteenth-century thought and literature, as well as a viable way of life." - Book cover

Publication/Creation

Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press, [2014]

Physical description

ix, 269 pages ; 25 cm.

Series

Contributors

Contents

Introduction: Variability : beyond sameness and difference / Chris Mounsey -- Part 1: Methodological. "Perfect according to their kind" : deformity, defect and disease in the natural philosophy of Margaret Cavendish / Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker ; What's the matter with madness? : John Locke, the Association of Ideas, and the physiology of thought / Jess Keiser ; Defections from nature : the rhetoric of deformity in Shaftesbury's Characteristics / Paul Kelleher ; Thomas Reid : power as first philosophy / Emile Bojesen -- Part 2: Conceptual. "An HOBBY-HORSE well worth giving a description of" : disability, trauma, and language in Tristram Shandy / Anna K. Sagal ; "One cannot be too secure" : wrongful confinement, or, the pathologies of the domestic economy / Dana Gliserman Kopans -- Part 3: Experiential. "On that rock I lay" : images of disability found in religious verse / Jamie Kinsley ; Attractive deformity : enabling the "shocking monster" from Sarah Scott's Agreeable ugliness / Jason S. Farr ; Reading "The Blind Poetess of Lichfield" : the consolatory odes of Priscilla Poynton / Jess Domanico ; God grant us grace, that we may take due pains, to practice what this exercise contains; to which, if we apply our best endeavour, we shall be happy here, and bless'd for ever / Chris Mounsey.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references (pages 247-261) and index.

Languages

Subjects

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    NH.AM.AA7
    		Open shelves

Permanent link

Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9781611485592
  • 1611485592