Joyce L. Huff and Martha Stoddard Holmes (eds), A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century

A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Joyce Huff and Martha Stoddard Holmes, fills a critical gap in Cultural Disability Studies. Forming part of the Bloomsbury series, A Cultural History of Disability, the present fifth volume aligns with the overarching intentions of general editors David Bolt and Robert McRuer, contributing to a project marked by a strong intersectional emphasis on cultural framings of disability. This cultural history of disability, ‘attuned to how disabled people have been caught up in systems of representation that have contained, disciplined, marginalized or normalized them’, ranges from literary and autobiographical writings of the period to discussions of the etymology of disability-related terminology, educational practices, medical treatments, and legal advancements (xiii). Attending to the many faces disability has taken, this edited collection, like the series as a whole, maintains a clear ‘focus [on] how disability has been portrayed in various aspects of culture and what these representations reveal about lingering and changing social attitudes and understandings’ (xiii).