Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World

ISBN-13: 9783030254605 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Preface: De/Coupling Monstrosity and Disability

Tory V. Pearman, Miami University

Introduction

1. Embodied Difference: Monstrosity and Disability, and the Posthuman

Asa Simon Mittman + Richard H. Godden, California State University, Chico, & Tulane University

Discourses of Bodily Difference

2. From Monstrosity to Abnormality: Montaigne, Canguilhem, Foucault

Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University 

3. “If in Other Respects He Appears to be Effectively Human”: Defining Monstrosity in Medieval English Law

Eliza Buhrer, Colorado School of Mines

4. (Dis)functional Faces: Signs of the Monstrous?

Emily Cock + Patricia Skinner, University of Winchester

5. Grendel and Goliath: Monstrous Superability and Disability in the Old English Corpus

Karen Bruce Wallace, The Ohio State University

6. E(race)ing the Future: Imagined Medieval Reproductive Possibilities and the Monstrosity of Power

Shyama Rajendran, The George Washington University

Dis/Identifying the Other

7. ‘Blob Child’ Revisited: Conflations of Monstrosity, Disability, and Race in King of Tars

Molly Lewis, The George Washington University

8. Attending to “Beasts Irrational” in Gower’s Visio Anglie

Haylie Swenson, George Washington University

9. How a Monster Means: The Significance of Bodily Difference in the Christopher Cynocephalus Tradition

Spencer Weinreich, University of Oxford

10. Lycanthropy and Lunacy: Cognitive Disability in The Duchess of Malfi

Sonya Freeman Loftis, Morehouse College

11. Eschatology for Cannibals: A System of Aberrance in the Old English Andreas

Leah Pope Parker, University of Wisconsin-Madison

12. The Monstrous Womb of Early Modern Midwifery Manuals

Melissa Hull Geil, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Queer Couplings 

13. Blindness and Posthuman Sexuality in Paradise Lost

John S. Garrison, Carroll University

14. Dwelling Underground in The Book of John Mandeville: Monstrosity, Disability, Ecology

Alan S. Montroso, English, George Washington University

Coda 

15. Muteness and Disembodied Difference: Three Case Studies

Karl Steel, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

O autorze

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.