Esmail, Jennifer (Author)
Ohio University Press
Physical Details: xi + 285 pp.; ill.
Language: English
Reading Victorian Deafness is the first book to address the crucial role that deaf people, and their unique language of signs, played in Victorian culture. Drawing on a range of works, from fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, to poetry by deaf poets and life writing by deaf memoirists Harriet Martineau and John Kitto, to scientific treatises by Alexander Graham Bell and Francis Galton, Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people's language use was a public, influential, and contentious issue in Victorian Britain. The Victorians understood signed languages in multiple, and often contradictory, ways: they were objects of fascination and revulsion, were of scientific import and literary interest, and were considered both a unique mode of human communication and a vestige of a bestial heritage. Over the course of the nineteenth century, deaf people were increasingly stripped of their linguistic and cultural rights by a widespread pedagogical and cultural movement known as “oralism,” comprising mainly hearing educators, physicians, and parents. Engaging with a group of human beings who used signs instead of speech challenged the Victorian understanding of humans as “the speaking animal” and the widespread understanding of “language” as a product of the voice. It is here that Reading Victorian Deafness offers substantial contributions to the fields of Victorian studies and disability studies. This book expands current scholarly conversations around orality, textuality, and sound while demonstrating how understandings of disability contributed to Victorian constructions of normalcy. Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people were used as material test subjects for the Victorian process of understanding human language and, by extension, the definition of the human.
...MoreReview Emmott, James (2014) Review of "Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture". Victorian Studies (pp. 133-135).
Similar Citations
Article
Wollock, Jeffrey;
(2013)
John Bulwer (1606--1656) and Some British and French Contemporaries
(/isis/citation/CBB001320484/)
Book
Craton, Lillian;
(2009)
The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB001230849/)
Chapter
Mangham, Andrew;
Depledge, Greta;
(2007)
Gynecological Controversy and Victorian Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB001035838/)
Thesis
Sparks, Tabitha;
(2001)
Family practices: Medicine, gender, and literature in Victorian culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001562639/)
Thesis
Choi, Tina Young;
(2003)
The Sanitary Imagination: Narrative and the Urban Condition in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB001562090/)
Book
Sedlmayr, Gerold;
(2011)
The Discourse of Madness in Britain, 1790--1815: Medicine, Politics, Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB001251927/)
Book
Pamboukian, Sylvia A.;
(2012)
Doctoring the Novel: Medicine and Quackery from Shelley to Doyle
(/isis/citation/CBB001251706/)
Article
Makras, Kostas;
(2010)
Dickensian Intemperance: The Representation of the Drunkard in “The Drunkard's Death” and The Pickwick Papers
(/isis/citation/CBB001022455/)
Book
Sandra Dinter;
Sarah Schäfer-Althaus;
(2023)
Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB177377952/)
Book
Natalie Roxburgh;
Jennifer S. Henke;
(2020)
Psychopharmacology in British Literature and Culture, 1780–1900
(/isis/citation/CBB400464162/)
Book
Penner, Louise;
Sparks, Tabitha;
(2015)
Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001422480/)
Book
Caldwell, Janis McLarren;
(2005)
Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot
(/isis/citation/CBB000641433/)
Article
Lovesey, Oliver;
(2013)
“The Poor Little Monstrosity”: Ellice Hopkins' Rose Turquand , Victorian Disability, and Nascent Eugenic Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB001200836/)
Book
Dawson, Gowan;
(2012)
Victorian Science and Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB001251062/)
Book
Shuttleton, David E.;
(2007)
Smallpox and the Literary Imagination 1660--1820
(/isis/citation/CBB000930590/)
Article
Jade Shepherd;
(2016)
‘I am not very well I feel nearly mad when I think of you’: Male Jealousy, Murder and Broadmoor in Late-Victorian Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB494287552/)
Book
Alison Moulds;
(2021)
Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s
(/isis/citation/CBB127072124/)
Book
Swenson, Kristine;
(2005)
Medical Women and Victorian Fiction
(/isis/citation/CBB000820014/)
Thesis
Russo, Sarah L.;
(2008)
Women's Self-Writing and Medical Science: Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Stoddard
(/isis/citation/CBB001561183/)
Book
Shuttleworth, Sally;
(2010)
The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840--1900
(/isis/citation/CBB001033221/)
Be the first to comment!