Disability and the Victorians

Disability and the Victorians PDF Author: Iain Hutchison
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526145707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Disability and the Victorians investigates the attitudes of Victorians towards people with impairments, illustrates how these influenced the interventions they introduced to support such people and considers the legacies they left behind by their actions and perspectives. A range of impairments are addressed in a variety of contexts.

Disability and the Victorians

Disability and the Victorians PDF Author: Iain Hutchison
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526145707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Disability and the Victorians investigates the attitudes of Victorians towards people with impairments, illustrates how these influenced the interventions they introduced to support such people and considers the legacies they left behind by their actions and perspectives. A range of impairments are addressed in a variety of contexts.

Fictions of Affliction

Fictions of Affliction PDF Author: Martha Stoddard Holmes
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472025961
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
"Highly recommended . . . Holmes moves seamlessly from novelists like Charles Dickens to sociologists like Henry Mayhew to autobiographers like John Kitto." ---Choice "An absolutely stunning book that will make a significant contribution to both Victorian literary studies and disability studies." ---Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory University "Establishes that Victorian melodrama informs many of our contemporary notions of disability . . . We have inherited from the Victorians not pandemic disability, but rather the complex of sympathy and fear." ---Victorian Studies Tiny Tim, Clym Yeobright, Long John Silver---what underlies nineteenth-century British literature's fixation with disability? Melodramatic representations of disability pervaded not only novels, but also doctors' treatises on blindness, educators' arguments for "special" education, and even the writing of disabled people themselves. Drawing on extensive primary research, Martha Stoddard Holmes introduces readers to popular literary and dramatic works that explored culturally risky questions like "can disabled men work?" and "should disabled women have babies?" and makes connections between literary plots and medical, social, and educational debates of the day. Martha Stoddard Holmes is Associate Professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University, San Marcos.

Understanding the Victorians

Understanding the Victorians PDF Author: Susie L. Steinbach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134818254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
Understanding the Victorians paints a vivid portrait of this era of dramatic change, combining broad survey with close analysis and introducing students to the critical debates taking place among historians today. Encompassing all of Great Britain and Ireland over the whole of the Victorian period, it gives prominence to social and cultural topics alongside politics and economics and emphasises class, gender, and racial and imperial positioning as constitutive of human relations. This second edition is fully updated throughout, containing a new chapter on leisure in the Victorian period, the most recent historiographical research in Victorian Studies, and enhanced coverage of imperialism and working-class life. Starting with the Queen Caroline Affair in 1820 and coming up to the start of World War I in 1914, Susie L. Steinbach uses thematic chapters to discuss and evaluate topics such as politics, imperialism, the economy, class, gender, the monarchy, arts and entertainment, religion, sexuality, religion, and science. There are also three chapters on space, consumption, and the law, topics rarely covered at this introductory level. With a clear introduction outlining the key themes of the period, a detailed timeline, and suggestions for further reading and relevant internet resources, this is the ideal companion for all students of the nineteenth century.

The Lifted Veil

The Lifted Veil PDF Author: George Eliot
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
ISBN: 1513275402
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 39

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Book Description
Latimer is cursed with psychic abilities that allow him to see the future, yet he’s unable to avoid the dark turn of his own life. What many consider a gift, he sees as a curse that has destroyed his ability to have normal relationships. Latimer can hear people’s deepest thoughts and has visions of their impending future. It’s a power he acquired at a young age following a brief illness. Latimer loathes his ability, as it has made it nearly impossible for him to make genuine connections. He unknowingly uncovers dark secrets that reveal the worst of humanity. Despite this foresight, Latimer’s desire to control his own narrative blinds him to an inevitable outcome. The Lifted Veil is a unique entry in Eliot’s literary catalogue. It was released the same year as her debut novel, Adam Bede, and is a stark departure from her usual themes. It highlights a different point-of-view and Eliot’s diverse storytelling ability. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Lifted Veil is both modern and readable.

Hearing Happiness

Hearing Happiness PDF Author: Jaipreet Virdi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022669075X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Weaving together lyrical history and personal memoir, Virdi powerfully examines society’s—and her own—perception of life as a deaf person in America. At the age of four, Jaipreet Virdi’s world went silent. A severe case of meningitis left her alive but deaf, suddenly treated differently by everyone. Her deafness downplayed by society and doctors, she struggled to “pass” as hearing for most of her life. Countless cures, treatments, and technologies led to dead ends. Never quite deaf enough for the Deaf community or quite hearing enough for the “normal” majority, Virdi was stuck in aural limbo for years. It wasn’t until her thirties, exasperated by problems with new digital hearing aids, that she began to actively assert her deafness and reexamine society’s—and her own—perception of life as a deaf person in America. Through lyrical history and personal memoir, Hearing Happiness raises pivotal questions about deafness in American society and the endless quest for a cure. Taking us from the 1860s up to the present, Virdi combs archives and museums to understand the long history of curious cures: ear trumpets, violet ray apparatuses, vibrating massagers, electrotherapy machines, airplane diving, bloodletting, skull hammering, and many more. Hundreds of procedures and products have promised grand miracles but always failed to deliver a universal cure—a harmful legacy that is still present in contemporary biomedicine. Blending Virdi’s own experiences together with her exploration into the fascinating history of deafness cures, Hearing Happiness is a powerful story that America needs to hear. Praise for Hearing Happiness “In part a critical memoir of her own life, this archival tour de force centers on d/Deafness, and, specifically, the obsessive search for a “cure”. . . . This survey of cure and its politics, framed by disability studies, allows readers—either for the first time or as a stunning example in the field—to think about how notions of remediation are leveraged against the most vulnerable.” —Public Books “Engaging. . . . A sweeping chronology of human deafness fortified with the author’s personal struggles and triumphs.” —Kirkus Reviews “Part memoir, part historical monograph, Virdi’s Hearing Happiness breaks the mold for academic press publications.” —Publishers Weekly “In her insightful book, Virdi probes how society perceives deafness and challenges the idea that a disability is a deficit. . . . [She] powerfully demonstrates how cures for deafness pressure individuals to change, to “be better.” —Washington Post

Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel PDF Author: Clare Walker Gore
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474455034
Category : Disabilities in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This book takes an exciting new approach to characterisation and plot in the Victorian novel, examining the vital narrative work performed by disabled characters.

Reading Victorian Deafness

Reading Victorian Deafness PDF Author: Jennifer Esmail
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821444514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Reading Victorian Deafness is the first book to address the crucial role that deaf people, and their unique language of signs, played in Victorian culture. Drawing on a range of works, from fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, to poetry by deaf poets and life writing by deaf memoirists Harriet Martineau and John Kitto, to scientific treatises by Alexander Graham Bell and Francis Galton, Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people’s language use was a public, influential, and contentious issue in Victorian Britain. The Victorians understood signed languages in multiple, and often contradictory, ways: they were objects of fascination and revulsion, were of scientific import and literary interest, and were considered both a unique mode of human communication and a vestige of a bestial heritage. Over the course of the nineteenth century, deaf people were increasingly stripped of their linguistic and cultural rights by a widespread pedagogical and cultural movement known as “oralism,” comprising mainly hearing educators, physicians, and parents. Engaging with a group of human beings who used signs instead of speech challenged the Victorian understanding of humans as “the speaking animal” and the widespread understanding of “language” as a product of the voice. It is here that Reading Victorian Deafness offers substantial contributions to the fields of Victorian studies and disability studies. This book expands current scholarly conversations around orality, textuality, and sound while demonstrating how understandings of disability contributed to Victorian constructions of normalcy. Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people were used as material test subjects for the Victorian process of understanding human language and, by extension, the definition of the human.

Annoying the Victorians

Annoying the Victorians PDF Author: James Kincaid
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317971183
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
What happens when bad criticism happens to good people? Annoying the Victorians sets the tradition of critical discourse and literary criticism on its ear, as well as a few other areas. James Kincaid brings his witty, erudite and thoroughly cynical self to the Victorians, and they will never read (or be read) quite the same.

The Measure of Manliness

The Measure of Manliness PDF Author: Karen Bourrier
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472052489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
Sheds new light on the narrative importance of the disabled man in Victorian literature and culture

The Victorians and Ancient Greece

The Victorians and Ancient Greece PDF Author: Richard Jenkyns
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description