1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910904100703321

Autore

Hobgood Allison P. <1977->

Titolo

Beholding disability in Renaissance England / / Allison P. Hobgood

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ann Arbor, Michigan : , : University of Michigan Press, , 2021

©2021

ISBN

9780472904747

0472904744

9780472128570

0472128574

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource

Collana

Corporealities: Discourses of disability

Classificazione

HIS037020SOC000000SOC029000

Disciplina

820.9/3561

Soggetti

People with disabilities in literature

English literature - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism

People with disabilities - Great Britain - History - 16th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (pages 225-250) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction: Acts of beholding -- Early modern ideologies of ability -- Making gains -- Prosthetic possibilities -- Desiring difference -- Disability aesthetics and conservation -- Coda: Beholding, again.

Sommario/riassunto

Human variation has always existed, though it has been conceived of and responded to variably. Beholding Disability in Renaissance England interprets sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature to explore the fraught distinctiveness of human bodyminds and the deliberate ways they were constructed in early modernity as able, and not. Hobgood examines early modern disability, ableism, and disability gain, purposefully employing these contemporary concepts to make clear how disability has historically been disavowed--and avowed too. Thus, this book models how modern ideas and terms make the weight of the past more visible as it marks the present, and cultivates dialogue in which early modern and contemporary theoretical models are mutually informative. Beholding Disability also uncovers crucial counterdiscourses circulating in the English Renaissance that opposed cultural fantasies of ability and had a keen sensibility toward non-normative embodiments. Hobgood reads impairments as varied as



epilepsy, stuttering, disfigurement, deafness, chronic pain, blindness, and castration in order to understand not just powerful fictions of ability present during the Renaissance but also the somewhat paradoxical, surprising ways these ableist ideals provided creative fodder for many Renaissance writers and thinkers. Ultimately, Beholding Disability asks us to reconsider what we think we know about being human both in early modernity, and today.