Celebrating Disability History Month 2022

From 16th November to 16th December 2022 it is Disability History Month throughout the UK, with events throughout the month celebrating the themes of Disability, Health and Wellbeing. To mark this, the team at Liverpool University Press have put together a curated reading list featuring books and articles from our collection which engage with ideas and narratives of disability. The following journal articles have been selected from our leading publication in disability studies, The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and all books listed below are available Open Access via the LUP website.

Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction by Ria Cheyne

Examining the intersection of disability and genre in popular works of horror, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and romance published since the late 1960s, Disability, Literature, Genre is a major contribution to both cultural disability studies and genre fiction studies. Drawing on recent work on affect and emotion, the book explores how disability makes us feel, and how those feelings shape interpersonal and fictional encounters, offering a timely reflection on scholarship of disability representation, as well as an innovative new theorisation of genre.

Read this OA via the LUP website >

Articulating Bodies: The Narrative Form of Disability and Illness in Victorian Fiction by Kylee-Anne Hingston

Articulating Bodies investigates the contemporaneous developments of Victorian fiction and disability’s medicalization by focusing on the intersection between narrative form and body, covering genres that typically relied upon disabled or diseased characters. By tracing the patterns of focalization and narrative structure across six decades, Articulating Bodies demonstrates that throughout the Victorian era, authors used narrative form and theme to negotiate how to categorize bodies, both constructing and questioning the boundary dividing normalcy from abnormality.

Read this OA via the LUP website >

Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints by Encarnación Juárez-Almendros

This book examines the concepts and role of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries from the perspective of feminist disability theories. This study explores a wide range of Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses, illustrating how such texts inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of female embodiment.

Read this OA via the LUP website >

Disability Studies and Spanish Culture: Films, Novels, the Comic and the Public Exhibition by Benjamin Fraser

Disability Studies and Spanish Culture is an important corrective to existing cultural studies of disability in Spain that tend to largely ignore intellectual disabilities. Taking on the representation of Down syndrome, autism, alexia/agnosia as well as childhood disability, its chapters combine close readings of a number of Spanish cultural products (films, novels, the comic/graphic novel and the public exhibition) with a broader socio-cultural take on the state of disability in Spain.

Read this OA via the LUP website >

Selected articles from the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies

Focusing on representations of disability, Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies publishes a wide variety of textual analyses that are informed by disability theory and, by extension, experiences of disability. Instrumental in the interdisciplinarity of literary studies, cultural studies, and disability studies, It is an essential disability studies journal for scholars whose work concentrates on the portrayal of disability.

The following articles are all currently free to read via the Liverpool University Press website >