Disability Studies

Concerto for the Left Hand by Michael Davidson

Fictions of Affliction by Martha Stoddard Holmes

Foucault and the Government of Disability by Shelly Lynn Tremain

Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body

Michael Davidson

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Concerto for the Left Hand: Practicing Disability Studies is a collection of essays by respected critic and scholar Michael Davidson that explores questions of disability and aesthetics across various art forms such as literature, performance, photography, and film. Davidson's work is at the cutting edge of the new and expanding area of disability studies in the arts. His topics in this volume include the phantom missing limb in film noir; the spreading panic over hemophilia, blood transfusions, and "hemophobia"; the theory that poetry exists beyond words—i.e., American Sign Language.

Michael Davidson is Professor of American Literature at the University of California San Diego and author of Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, and The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community and Mid-Century.

June 2008
272 Pages

Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture

Martha Stoddard Holmes

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Why do so many of the most memorable fictional characters in nineteenth-century British literature have disabilities? What did physical disability really mean in Victorian Britain—and what can that meaning teach us about Victorian culture? Fictions of Affliction seeks to answer these questions by investigating works of drama and fiction, writing of the period, and personal testimony of Victorians with disabilities. Holmes finds that melodramatic representations of disability pervaded not only novels by Dickens, but also doctors' treatises on blindness, educator's arguments for "special" education, and even the writing of disabled people themselves.

The first book of its kind to contribute a new emphasis to Victorian literary and cultural studies, Fictions brings the most current critical concerns to bear on questions of the representation of disability.

Martha Stoddard Holmes is Assistant Professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University, San Marcos.

February 2004
252 pages

Foucault and the Government of Disability

Shelley Lynn Tremain

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Foucault and the Government of Disability is a gathering of original essays by an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars to explore the relevance and importance of the ideas of Michel Foucault to the field of disability studies—and vice versa.

It is a book that is necessary and timely at this stage in the evolution of scholarship in disability studies. The essays are original and compelling, treating a range of engaging subjects from autism to sports arenas.

"A beautiful exploration of how Foucault's analytics of power and genealogies of discursive knowledges can open up new avenues for thinking critically about phenomena that many of us often take to be inevitable and thus the new ways of resisting and possibly at times redirecting the forces that shape our lives. Every scholar, indeed every person with an interest in Foucault or in political theory more generally, needs to read this book."
—Ladelle McWhorter, author of Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization

Shelley Lynn Tremain teaches in the Philosophy Department of the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

Spring 2005
362 pages