New Books
Representations:Health, Disability, Culture
Edited by Stuart Murray
This series provides a ground-breaking and innovative selection of titles that showcase the newest interdisciplinary research on the cultural representations of health and disability in the contemporary social world. Bringing together both subjects and working methods from literary studies, film and cultural studies, medicine and sociology, ‘Representations’ is scholarly and accessible, addressed to researchers across a number of academic disciplines, and practitioners and members of the public with interests in issues of public health.
The key term in the series will be representations. Public interest in questions of health and disability has never been stronger, and as a consequence cultural forms across a range of media currently produce a never-ending stream of narratives and images that both reflect this interest and generate its forms. The crucial value of the series is that it brings the skilled study of cultural narratives and images to bear on such contemporary medical concerns. It offers and responds to new research paradigms that advance understanding at a scholarly level of the interaction between medicine, culture and society; it also has a strong commitment to public concerns surrounding such issues, and maintains a tone and point of address that seeks to engage a general audience.
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Praise for Aesthetic Nervousness
Ato Quayson
Focusing primarily on the work of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole
Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee, Ato Quayson launches a thoroughly
cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study of the representation of
physical disability. Quayson suggests that the subliminal unease and
moral panic invoked by the disabled is refracted within the structures
of literature and literary discourse itself, a crisis he terms
"aesthetic nervousness." The disabled reminds the able-bodied that the
body is provisional and temporary and that normality is wrapped up in
certain social frameworks. Quayson expands his argument by turning to
Greek and Yoruba writings, African-American and postcolonial literature,
depictions of deformed characters in early modern England and the plays
of Shakespeare, and children's films, among other texts. He considers
how disability affects interpersonal relationships and forces the
character and the reader to take an ethical standpoint, much like
representations of violence, pain, and the sacred.
Autism and Representation
Mark Osteen
The first scholarly book on autism and the humanities, brings scholars from several different disciplines together with adults on the autism spectrum to investigate the diverse ways that autism has been represented in novels, poems, autobiographies, films and clinical discourses, and to explore the connections and demarcations between autistic and "normal" creative expression.
Editor, Dr. David Bolt |
Book Reviews Editor, Dr. Clare Barker
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