MACMILLAN Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama (Literary Disability Studies)

Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. Proffering an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, the contributors suggest methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts. The volume also includes essays on disabled actors whose performances are changing the meanings of disability in Shakespeare for present-day audiences. By combining these two areas of scholarship, this text makes a unique intervention in early modern studies and disability studies alike. Ultimately, the volume generates a conversation that locates and theorizes the staging of particular disabilities within their historical and literary contexts while considering continuity and change in the performance of disability between the early modern period and our own.  Review “Dunn offers here a substantial contribution both to early modern disability studies and to performance studies. With nuance and care, these essays offer solid readings of canonical and non-canonical examples of early modern texts portraying disability: from ballads, to medical texts; from anti-theatrical pamphlets, to Renaissance drama. Throughout, the contributors’ focus on disability performance, in all its varying complexities, collapses these sixteenth-century texts with twenty-first-century concerns, which makes Dunn’s volume both innovative and intriguing.” ( David Houston Wood, Distinguished Professor of English, North Michigan University, USA) From the Back Cover Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama investigates the cultural work done by early modern theatrical performances of disability. Proffering an expansive view of early modern disability in performance, the contributors suggest methodologies for finding and interpreting it in unexpected contexts. The volume also includes essays on disabled actors whose performances are changing the meanings of disability in Shakespeare for present-day audiences. By combining these two areas of scholarship, this text makes a unique intervention in early modern studies and disability studies alike. Ultimately, the volume generates a conversation that locates and theorizes the staging of particular disabilities within their historical and literary contexts while considering continuity and change in the performance of disability between the early modern period and our own.  About the Author Leslie C. Dunn is Professor of English at Vassar College, USA, where she also teaches in the Women’s Studies, Medieval/Renaissance Studies, and Media Studies programs. She co-edited two interdisciplinary collections, Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (1994) and Gender and Song in Early Modern England (2014). Her research and teaching interests include Shakespeare and early modern drama, gender studies, and disability studies.