Synopses & Reviews
< p=""> Inaugurates a new field of disability studies by framing disability as a minority discourse rather than a medical one, revising oppressive narratives and revealing liberatory ones. The book examines disabled figures in Harriet Beecher Stowe's < i=""> Uncle Tom's Cabin<> and Rebecca Harding Davis's < i=""> Life in the Iron Mills, <> in African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, and in the popular cultural ritual of the freak show.<>
Synopsis
As the first major critical study to examine literary and cultural representations of physical disability, Extraordinary Bodies situates disability as a social construction, shifting it from a property of bodies to a product of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do. Rosemarie Garland Thomson examines disabled figures in sentimental novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, and the popular cultural ritual of the freak show.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [173]-189) and index.
Table of Contents
The cultural work of American freak shows, 1835-1940. The spectacle of the extraordinary body -- Constituting the average man -- Identification and the longing for distinction -- From freak to specimen : "The Hottentot Venus" and "The Ugliest Woman in the World" -- The end of the prodigious body.