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‘Writing Pain’ argues that Anna Seward‘s Letters (1811) and Mary Robinson‘s letters (1800) create alternative models of sensibility from the suffering poet of Charlotte Smith‘s Elegiac Sonnets. Immensely popular, Smith‘s sonnets made feminine suffering a source of poetic agency by aestheticizing and privatizing it. However, despite their sincerity, her sonnets effaced the physical, nervous body of sensibility on which Seward‘s and Robinsons early poetic reputations had depended and for which they had been mocked. The popularity of Smith‘s model made it an important model for women poets, but, by the end of the eighteenth century, sensibility was also associated with sickness and artifice. For Seward and Robinson, who wanted to build their literary reputations but were living with disabled bodies, Smiths example needed to be reimagined to account for the reciprocity of body and mind as they struggled to write through pain.
This book sheds new light on the human cost of industrialisation by examining the lives and experiences of those disabled in an industry that was vital to Britain's economic growth. If disability has been largely absent from conventional histories of industrialisation, the Industrial Revolution has assumed great significance in disability studies. The book examines the economic and welfare responses to disease, injury and impairment among coal workers. It discusses experiences of disability within the context of social relations and the industrial politics of coalfield communities. The book provides the context for those that follow by providing an overview of the conditions of work in British coalmining between 1780 and 1880. It turns its attention to the principal causes of disablement in the nineteenth-century coal industry and the medical responses to them. The book then extends the discussion of responses to disability by examining the welfare provisions for miners with long-term restrictive health conditions. It also examines how miners and their families negotiated a 'mixed economy' of welfare, comprising family and community support, the Poor Law, and voluntary self-help as well as employer paternalism. The book shifts attention away from medicine and welfare towards the ways in which disability affected social relations within coalfield communities. Finally, it explores the place of disability in industrial politics and how fluctuating industrial relations affected the experiences of disabled people in the coalfields.
In 1985 Roy Porter called for patients to be retrieved from the margins of
history because, without them, our understanding of illness and healthcare would
remain distorted. But despite concerted efforts, the innovation that Porter
envisaged has not come to pass.
Patient voices in Britain repositions the
patient at the centre of healthcare histories. By prioritising the patient’s
perspective in the century before the foundation of the National Health Service,
this edited collection enriches our understanding of healthcare in the context
of Britain’s emerging welfare state. Encompassing topics like ethical archival
practice, life within institutions, user-driven medicine and the impact of shame
and stigma on health outcomes, its chapters encourage historians to reimagine
patienthood. It provides a model for using new sources and reading familiar
sources in new ways. And, exploring traditional clinical spaces and beyond, it
interrogates what it meant to be a patient and how this has changed over
time.
Crucially, the collection also aims to help historians locate and
develop policy relevance within their work, reflecting on how these historical
tensions continue to shape attitudes towards health, illness and the clinical
encounter. Each chapter presents a framework for using history to speak to
pressing policy issues.
This is the first extensive study of literary swooning, homing in on the swoon’s long, rich and suggestive history as well as its potential for opening up new ways of thinking about the contemporary. From the lives of medieval saints to recent romance fiction, the swoon has had a pivotal place in English literature. This study shows that swoons have been intimately connected to explorations of emotionality, ecstasy and transformation; to depictions of sickness and of dying; and to performances of gender and gendering. A literary history of swooning is therefore also a history of crux points for how we imagine the body, and for evolving ideas of physiology, gender, and sexuality. Tracking the history of the figure of the swoon from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century, this study suggests that the swoon has long been used as a way to figure literary creation and aesthetic sensitivity: from the swoons of early mystics to contemporary literary-theoretical depictions of destabilised subjects, literary faints have offered a model of overwhelming, aesthetic, affective response. In the work of Chaucer and Shakespeare, swoons are seen as moments of generic possibility, through which the direction of a text might be transformed. In romantic, gothic and modernist fiction, this study focuses on morbid, feminised swoons used by writers who reject masculinist, heteronormative codes of health. In contemporary romance fiction, irony, cliché and bathos shadow the transformative possibilities of the swoon. This book offers an exciting new way to examine the history of the body alongside the history of literary response.
critiqued by scholars of disability, who argue that disability is by no means necessarily ‘a bad thing’, an issue that I explore in the section on ‘Defining disability’. 6 After considering the ways in which Elizabeth Barnes’s recent metaphysics of disability has problematised the concept of normalcy, I go on to argue that defining disability using a naturalistic framework is problematised not only by scholarship from disability studies but also by researches from the field of hedonic psychology. In the section on ‘Well-being and disability’, I argue that the existence
Carlson (Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 140. 10 Licia Carlson, ‘Cognitive Ableism and Disability Studies: Feminist Reflections on the History of Mental Retardation’, Hypatia 16.4 (2001), 124–145. 124 D. Christopher Gabbard 11 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 200. 12 Ibid., 237. 13 Isaac Asimov, The Annotated Gulliver’s Travels (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1980), 270. 14 ‘Infant, n.1–2’, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), OED Online. 15 Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 224. 16 Ibid., 237. 17 Ibid., 197. 18 Ibid., 237. 19 Ibid
absent or insufficient. Ultimately, I call for critical thinking on smoking from the perspective of feminist intersectionality and disability studies. A (queer) love story I met her on Tinder. I was in Vienna for an academic conference and since my academic companions were younger than me, their party night interests were quite different from my own. I wanted to meet someone to
sensory impairment, meeting and modulating (extending or deforming) the incompleteness of the human sensorium. We need to be careful not to assume any simple adequation of a professionalized reading of a poem with the assistive devices that ‘supplement and complete disabled bodies’. 30 But at very least, the logic of the aesthetic process described above would affirm a fundamental concept of disability studies—which Godden phrases as the ‘immanent vulnerability’ of all bodies—while entangling that vulnerable
The concluding paragraph ties together the major themes of the book, and describes more fully the importance of the “moron” classification within the overall context of the eugenic alarm period in the United States, along with reasons that the themes explored in the book became important ways of framing those diagnosed as “morons”. This paragraph also discusses issues related to disability studies and eugenics, as well as contemporary relevance, especially in regard to those current practices that may be considered forms of eugenics.
The book advances our understanding of performance as a mode of caring and explores the relationship between socially engaged performance and care. It creates a dialogue between theatre and performance, care ethics and other disciplinary areas such as youth and disability studies, nursing, criminal justice and social care. Challenging existing debates in this area by rethinking the caring encounter as a performed, embodied experience and interrogating the boundaries between care practice and performance, the book engages with a wide range of different care performances drawn from interdisciplinary and international settings. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates, the edited collection examines how the field of performance and the aesthetic and ethico-political structures that determine its relationship with the social might be challenged by an examination of inter-human care. It interrogates how performance might be understood as caring or uncaring, careless or careful, and correlatively how care can be conceptualised as artful, aesthetic, authentic or even ‘fake’ and ‘staged’. Through a focus on care and performance, the contributors in the book consider how performance operates as a mode of caring for others and how dialogical debates between the theory and practice of care and performance making might foster a greater understanding of how the caring encounter is embodied and experienced.