Fictions of affliction : physical disability in Victorian culture / Martha Stoddard Holmes.

Author
Stoddard Holmes, Martha [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
  • Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2004]
  • ©2004
Description
1 online resource (xiv, 228 pages) : illustrations

Details

Subject(s)
Series
Corporealities [More in this series]
Medium/​Support
polychrome. rdacc http://rdaregistry.info/termList/RDAColourContent/1003
Summary note
"We all know Tiny Tim, that familiar Victorian figure of infirmity, sentimentality, and charity: why do so many of the most memorable fiction characters in nineteenth-century British literature have disabilities? What did physical disability mean to people in Victorian Britain - and what can that meaning teach us about Victorian culture? In Fictions of Affliction, Martha Stoddard Holmes seeks to answer these questions by investigating works of drama and fiction and other writing of the period, including the personal testimony of Victorians with disabilities. Holmes finds that melodramatic representations of disability pervaded not only novels by Dickens, but also doctors' treatises on blindness, educators' arguments for "special" education, and even the writing of disabled people themselves."--Jacket.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-221) and index.
Source of description
Print version record.
Contents
  • Melodramatic bodies
  • Marital melodramas : disabled women and Victorian marriage plots
  • "My old delightful sensation" : Wilkie Collins and the disabling of melodrama
  • An object for compassion, an enemy to the state : imagining disabled boys and men
  • Melodramas of the self : auto/biographies of Victorians with physical disabilities.
ISBN
  • 9780472025961 ((electronic bk.))
  • 0472025961 ((electronic bk.))
OCLC
300839856
Other standard number
  • 10.3998/mpub.11877
Statement on language in description
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