The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre and Disability Edited by David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth J. Donaldson
This book is the first to examine Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre from a disability studies approach. Offering an appreciation and analysis of the ways in which disability, disfigurement, mental illness, cognitive alterity, addiction, and related ideas figure in this classic text, the aim of The Madwoman and the Blindman is to collect substantial essays by literary and cultural scholars to contribute to the growing discipline of disability studies. In order to achieve this aim, the proposed book will draw on theory and criticism in literary, cultural, gender, Victorian, film, and disability studies, bringing together essays that offer fresh insights into Brontë’s classic nineteenth-century novel.
Rationale. With an undisputed place in the English literary canon and as an established landmark of feminist literature, Jane Eyre has garnered the attention of literary critics and of cultural and political theorists for generations. The discourse initiated, or at least perpetuated by Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic has considered gender, ethnicity, and class extensively, but this taxonomy is deficient without the inclusion of disability, a cultural and political identity of increasing stature. Although few novels have received the same intense critical attention as Jane Eyre, until now, no single volume has focused on analyzing and theorizing the role of disability. In fact, the most visible aspects of disability have traditionally been understood in rather transparent symbolic
terms: the blindness of Rochester and the “madness” of Bertha apparently standing in for other aspects of identity. But now that recent scholarly interest in the representation of disability has led to a richer and more complex framework for understanding disability in literature, as well as creating new political, social, and aesthetic inroads into the appreciation of fiction, it has become necessary to fill this gap in Brontë scholarship. For the first time, a scholarly book on Brontë’s Jane Eyre invites readers to investigate the text through the lens of disability, providing a critical appreciation of the ways in which disability is depicted in the novel.
Prospective authors should send a proposal (500-700 words) and a
biographical note to the editors on or before 1 January, 2009.
Selected authors will be required to submit completed essays on or before 1 January, 2010. Editors: David Bolt (bolt@talktalk.net); Julia Miele Rodas (Julia.Rodas@bcc.cuny.edu); and Elizabeth J. Donaldson (edonalds@nyit.edu).
(h/t H-DISABILITY listserv)
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