Novel Bodies

Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Jason S. Farr

• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781684481071, 9781684481088
• eBook ISBN: 9781684481095
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Novel Bodies examines how disability shapes the British literary history of sexuality. Jason 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 in Novel Bodies expose emerging ideas of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as interconnected systems that sustain dominant models of courtship, reproduction, and degeneracy. Further, Farr argues that they use intersections of disability and queerness to stage an array of contemporaneous debates covering topics as wide-ranging as education, feminism, domesticity, medicine, and plantation life. In his close attention to the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney, Farr demonstrates that disabled and queer characters inhabit strict social orders in unconventional ways, and thus opened up new avenues of expression for readers from the eighteenth century forward.
Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Disability and the Literary History of Sexuality
• 1. Deaf Education and Queerness in the Duncan Campbell Compendium (1720–1732)
• 2. The Reforming Bodies of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Sarah Scott’s Fiction (1754–1766)
• 3. Chronic Illness, Medicine, and the Healthy Marriages of Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)
• 4. Gendered Disfigurement and Queer Ocular Relations in Frances Burney’s Camilla (1796) and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801)
• Coda: Hypochondria and the Implausibility of Heterosexual Romance in Jane Austen’s Sanditon (1817)
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author