Le handicap dans la fiction gothique

Disability and the Gothic

Call for papers

The relationship between disability and the Gothic, as Martha Stoddard Holmes rightly observes, has been undertheorized by scholars of the genre. This is surprising, given the intensity with which the Gothic has historically explored and exploited the prejudices associated with human difference as manifested in physiological and mental deviations from a perceived norm. The proposed volume, which will be presented within the established International Gothic Series, published by Manchester University Press, will explore the uses and abuses of disability in Gothic fiction from the eighteenth century to the present, and will advance a genuinely international and multicultural analysis of this neglected aspect of Gothic stylistics. We particularly welcome papers that discuss Gothic textuality beyond the established European and American canon. Issues which might be explored by contributors could include (but are not limited to):

Abject bodies
Amputation  
Birth defects   
Body Integrity Disorder 
Body modification  
Branding and scarification
Conjoined siblings 
Corrective surgery 
Degeneration  
Hermaphroditism     
Hospital culture   
Human vivisection
Leprosy
Mental illness
Phantom limbs
Pigmentation variations
Post-apocalyptic bodies
Prostheses
Queer bodies
Ritual disfigurement
Supernumerary limbs
Zoomorphism
Proposals of approximately 500 words should be sent to the editors by 30 September 2013:
William Hughes, Department of English, Bath Spa University, Newton Park, Bath BA2 9BN UK e-mail w.hughes@bathspa.ac.uk
Andrew Smith, School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7RA UK e-mail andrew.smith1@sheffield.ac.uk