The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century (Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850)
- Submitting institution
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University of Winchester
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- 34CM3
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Bucknell University Press
- ISBN
- 9781611485592
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
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- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Idea of Disability is the first ever collection of essays about disability in the eighteenth century and is made up of contributions solicited from the Disability Studies Caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) and elsewhere. Its origins lay in Mounsey’s discussions with international collaborators which led initially to panels on Disability Studies at the ASECS Annual Conference in Vancouver in 2011, and then to Mounsey’s founding the Disability Studies Caucus for that society.
Mounsey’s substantial, sole-authored Introduction presents a history of academic Disability Studies from the first dawning of the idea that an historicist study of disability might be possible, in Henri-Jacques Stiker’s A History of Disability (1982), and explains why the Foucauldian approach to Disability Studies, favoured by many other writers and led by Lennard Davies, misses the subtleties of disabled experience. It also first mints the idea of VariAbility as an organising principle for the study of the multiplicity of the body in history, and one which begins to challenge the hegemony of Foucault’s metaphorical understanding of disability in terms of oppression. VariAbility calls out individual case studies of unique people in particular contexts.
The essays were chosen to give a background to this changing economy of disability studies, from the Foucauldian in the Methodological section, to the contextual in the Conceptual section, to the individual in the Experiential section.
The collection lay the foundation of the VariAbilities series of conferences, which were described by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as shifting the paradigm of Disability Studies from an objective to a subject study.
Mounsey’s further essay in the collection, on Thomas Gills, is not offered as part of the submission, since it is superseded by a chapter in Mounsey’s monograph, Sight Correction, which is also a submitted output.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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