Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment

ISBN-13: 9780415886444 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 228 str.

David M. Turner

Opis

Disability is a burgeoning area of historical research. Historians of disability -- largely looking back at the period from a modern perspective -- have identified the eighteenth century as a key period of transition. In materialist histories of disability, the stirrings of industrialisation and economic change in this period is taken to herald the emergence of new modes of economic rationality that served to marginalise and devalue people with impairments as they were excluded from the mode of production. In other accounts, the period is one in which the dominant cultural paradigm for understanding impairment shifted from a 'religious' model, in which disability was viewed as 'an immutable condition caused by supernatural agency', to a 'medical' model which cast disability as 'a biological insufficiency amenable to professional treatment'. This book seeks to re-assess and modify these perceptions of the pre-modern era.

Spis treści

Selected Contents: 1. Defining Disability and Deformity  2. Religious and Medical Perspectives on Disability  3. Stereotypes and Cultural Representation  4. Visibility and Visualisation: Seeing the Disabled  5. Disabled Lives and Letters  6. Narratives of the Disabled Poor

O autorze

David M. Turner is Senior Lecturer in History at Swansea University.