Novel Bodies

Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Jason S. Farr

2019
206 pages
$34.95
ISBN 9781684481071
Transits

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.

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Reviews
"This sensitive study convincingly demonstrates just how ubiquitous is the eighteenth-century novel's engagement with the queer implications of disability, showing how disabled characters mark out alternative possibilities."-Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Spring 2022

"Farr reorients our understanding of how disability and sexuality are inextricably linked and how these intersecting categories shape the novel's form and content." -Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Fall 2021

"This is an important first book that will establish Farr as a major voice in queer and disability studies."-Aphra Behn Online

"Farr shows such sanctified realms to be under constant disturbance by figures who do not, will not, cannot conform, and whose resistance signals alternate realities to the ones novels try to sustain."-In Digital Defoe, Fall 2020

"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

"Jason Farr's Novel Bodies is a rigorously argued and elegantly written account of how eighteenth-century fiction represented the interrelations of sexuality and disability.... Novel Bodies is an important contribution to disability studies, queer studies, and, more generally, the history of the novel."-Paul Kelleher, Emory University

"Novel Bodies makes a thrilling foray into a number of critical conversations."-Eighteenth Century Studies, Spring 2020

"Novel Bodies inhabits the fascinating messiness of Georgian-era literary imaginings of corporeal and sexual difference in order to better historicize disability's formative role in the development of the modern self and its queer relationship to able-bodiedness."-Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 2020

"By attending to representations of corporealities and sexualities that seem liberating, oppressive, recuperative, and resistant, Farr renders the genealogy of sex and disability in a way that challenges those consequences of the Enlightenment that we are still wrestling with today."-Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Summer 2020

"Novel Bodies bridges the established fields of eighteenth-century disability studies and queer studies...to become an astute model for intertwining theories of disability and sexuality."-Studies in the Novel, Fall 2020

About the author:

Jason S. Farr is an assistant professor of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $99.95, 978-1-6844-8108-8; EPUB: $34.95, 978-1-6844-8109-5