MACMILLAN Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature: Invalid Lives (Literary Disability Studies)

Until the nineteenth century, consumptives were depicted as sensitive, angelic beings whose purpose was to die beautifully and set an example of pious suffering – while, in reality, many people with tuberculosis faced unemployment, destitution, and an unlovely death in the workhouse. Focusing on the period 1821-1912, in which modern ideas about disease, disability, and eugenics emerged to challenge Romanticism and sentimentality, Invalid Lives examines representations of nineteenth-century consumptives as disabled people. Letters, self-help books, eugenic propaganda, and press interviews with consumptive artists suggest that people with tuberculosis were disabled as much by oppressive social structures and cultural stereotypes as by the illness itself. Invalid Lives asks whether disruptive consumptive characters in Wuthering Heights, Jude the Obscure, The Idiot, and Beatrice Harraden’s 1893 New Woman novel Ships That Pass in the Night represented critical, politicised models of disabled identity (and disabled masculinity) decades before the modern disability movement. Review “Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity in Nineteenth Century Literature is a spirited and rewarding study of that long and variegated process of ‘giving way,’ where change takes hold, if only temporarily.” (Maria Frawley, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Vol. 46 (2), 2019) “The points in Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity are made elegantly and with convincing supporting examples. And the book’s organisation is logical, lending further satisfaction. ... There is much to be gained from this book, including the seemingly simple but actually far-reaching realisation that not all Victorian representations of ‘consumption’ should automatically be understood to represent ‘tuberculosis’.” (Heidi Logan, The Wilkie Collins Journal, October, 2019) “Tuberculosis and Disabled Identity is an intensely informative text, which puts forward challenging and nuanced theories and readings while still remaining accessible to the reader. It offers a new and exciting perspective on nineteenth century fiction which engages with the literary tradition of depicting the ‘consumptive’, and does so in a fascinating, thought-provoking, and enlightening way.” (Emily Jessica Turner, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, October 30, 2018) About the Author Alex Tankard lectures in English Literature at the University of Chester, UK. She has published essays on Aubrey Beardsley and Doc Holliday and tuberculosis; this is her first book.