Description:
Novel Bodies examines the significant role that disability plays in shaping the British literary history of sexuality. Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. In imagining the lived experience of disability as analogous to--and as informed by--queer genders and sexualities, the authors featured reveal emerging ideas of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as interconnected systems that sustain dominant models of courtship, reproduction, and degeneracy.
Review Quotes: "In this extremely lucid, well-researched, and well argued book, Farr uncovers a vast representational landscape of queer disability in which the heteronormative narratives of eighteenth-century fiction are profoundly imbricated and to which they are indebted."--Helen Deutsch "UCLA"