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The Historicist Turn of Romantic‐Era Disability Studies, or Frankenstein in the Dark
Author(s) -
Wang Fuson
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
literature compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.158
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 1741-4113
DOI - 10.1111/lic3.12400
Subject(s) - historicism , disability studies , ideology , new historicism , enlightenment , romance , narrative , romanticism , metaphor , scholarship , interpretation (philosophy) , theme (computing) , aesthetics , literature , psychology , sociology , psychoanalysis , epistemology , philosophy , art , politics , gender studies , linguistics , law , operating system , political science , computer science
The field of disability studies has recently matured from its abstractly polemical origins to its current historicist orientation. This turn has allowed disability to become a key feature of mainstream contemporary literary scholarship. Romantic studies, though, has been relatively slow to adopt the new discourse. This essay offers a tentative explanation and a state‐of‐the‐nascent‐field assessment of Romantic‐era disability studies. Applying theory to practice, I show how both literary criticism and disability studies by themselves miss the point of Mary Shelley's Romantic‐era novel Frankenstein (1818). For example, a literary critical approach reads the theme of blindness as a metaphor for a kind of paradoxical insight, whereas a disability studies reading takes umbrage at the exploitation of the blind for narrative gain. Moving past this ideological impasse requires a more synthetic discourse that leverages the historicist turn of disability studies to model a more honest interpretation. By positioning the novel against Enlightenment theories of blindness, I argue that Shelley offers a more nuanced account of abnormal embodiment than disability scholars have traditionally allowed.