Overview
- Offers wide-ranging and interdisciplinary essays on medicine, literature, religion, art history, law, and ethics
- Promotes a useful and important discussion about the vitality of disability studies within medieval and early modern studies
- Breaks new ground through its specific examination of disability in relation to monstrosity during these periods
Part of the book series: The New Middle Ages (TNMA)
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Table of contents (15 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Introduction
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Front Matter
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Discourses of Bodily Difference
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Front Matter
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Dis/Identifying the Other
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Front Matter
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Coda
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Front Matter
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Keywords
About this book
This collection examines the intersection of the discourses of “disability” and “monstrosity” in a timely and necessary intervention in the scholarly fields of Disability Studies and Monster Studies. Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters. In many cases throughout Western history, a figure marked by what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “the extraordinary body” is labeled a “monster.” This volume explores the origins of this conflation, examines the problems and possibilities inherent in it, and casts both disability and monstrosity in light of emergent, empowering discourses of posthumanism.
Reviews
“This excellent collection presents essays from a variety of disciplines and deploys a range of theoretical approaches as it explores the categories in its title. The contributors also exploit the frictions among the categories, not only to define their differences but also to demonstrate how—or whether—monstrosity and disability might meaningfully intersect in formulations of the posthuman. The nuanced treatments of the topics in this volume create remarkable and often unexpected synergies that will challenge and reward its readers.” (Edward Wheatley, Professor of English, Loyola University Chicago, USA)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Richard H. Godden is Assistant Professor of English at Louisiana State University, USA, where he works on the representations of disability in medieval literature and culture.
Asa Simon Mittman is Professor of Art and Art History at California State University, Chico, USA, and author of several books and articles on monsters and marginality.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World
Editors: Richard H. Godden, Asa Simon Mittman
Series Title: The New Middle Ages
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25458-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-25457-5Published: 02 December 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-25460-5Published: 17 December 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-25458-2Published: 21 November 2019
Series ISSN: 2945-5936
Series E-ISSN: 2945-5944
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXVII, 352
Number of Illustrations: 19 b/w illustrations
Topics: Medieval Literature, Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, History of Medieval Europe