AustLit

'In Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's "Disability and Representation," the feminist disability studies scholar comments that disabled or "unusually embodied" characters "have fired the imagination and underwritten the metaphors of classic Western literature" (523). Garland-Thomson suggests that nonnormative embodiment is not only fundamental to the telos of literary narrative and character development but seldom treated as a mundane (and inevitable) fact of human existence. Instead, impairments often serve as expedient markers of a character's moral failings, as Ato Quayson puts it, an "ethical background to the actions of other characters" (36). Or, as Maren Tova Linett asserts, they serve as a broader statement on the ways that normalcy, personhood, bodiliness, and difference have been understood in various cultures across time (4–5). Clare Barker and Stuart Murray observe that "it is rare to encounter an account of [disability] … that does not extend to a comment on what that body does or, crucially, means" (2). And it is predominantly the literary-aesthetic domain, for Quayson, that not only reflects but refracts "multivalent attitudes toward disability"; the dissemination of such attitudes in society can have important consequences for the lived experience of people with disabilities depending on whether they are "enlightened and progressive" or, what is more often the case, reductive and stigmatizing (36).' (Introduction)