Disability and Rurality in American Literature

Ecosomatic Pastoralism

Matthew J. C. Cella

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216253822
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Matthew J.C. Cella examines the ways in which contemporary American writers deploy disability in order to deconstruct American pastoralism.

An essential tenet of pastoralism is that encounters with rural landscapes quicken the human imagination by heightening awareness of and appreciation for the natural world. This study examines the counterpart to this formulation by underscoring the ways in which disability-as concept and experience-complicates pastoralism's exaltation of rurality and rural experience. The texts examined in this book ultimately push back against the conventional pastoral ideal by exposing the ways in which dominant social constructions of rurality work to create disability. Additionally, many of the writers Cella analyzes contribute to a counter-rurality that is ultimately more complex and inclusive than what is featured in conventional American pastoralism. Ecosomatic pastoralism emphasizes the importance of locating an alignment between embodiment and emplacement through the space found between individual bodies and the landscapes they inhabit as well as the human and nonhuman bodies they interact with. Ultimately, this book examines literary texts that challenge notions of rurality that proclaim that certain ways of being-in-the-world are more "natural" than others.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright Acknowledgment
• Introduction: Embodiment and Emplacement and the Disability-Rurality Nexus
• 1 Denied Rural: Disability and Race in Contemporary Slave Narratives
• 2 Deficient Rural: Disability and the Myth of the Frontier in Great Plains Fiction
• 3 Stolen Rural and Anticolonial Discourse in Louise Erdrich’s Pillager Novels
• 4 Therapeutic Rural and Institutionalization in Rudolfo Anaya’s Tortuga and Marge Piercy’s The Woman at the Edge of Time
• 5 Retrofit Rural: Embodiment and Emplacement in Disability Memoirs
• References
• Index