Disability.
- Author/Editor
- Hsy, Jonathan.
- Title
- Disability.
- Published
- Hsy, Jonathan. "Disability." The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, edited by David Hillman and Ulrika Maude. Cambridge UP, 2015. pp. 24-40.
- Review
- Hsy opens his essay with a discussion of Teresa de Cartagena and her treatment of deafness in "Arboleda de los Enfermos" [Grove of the Infirm], by way of anchoring his argument that "disability [is] more than a topic or trope pervading literature" (27); instead, he offers it as a way of both depicting and understanding one's orientation in the world. Of especial interest to Gower scholars, Hsy offers some insights on Gower's autobiographical writing that reflect on Gower's visual impairment later in life. Gower, rather than seeking some spiritual meaning in his blindness, instead explores how his impairment has altered his "strategies of literary composition" (33). Hsy offers a powerful reading of a poem in which Gower discusses his blindness, suggesting that despite claiming he will no longer write Gower actually develops "new opportunities for poetic self-fashioning" (34). Hsy then goes on to explore representations of disability in Chaucer's "The Monk's Tale" and Margery Kempe's "Book" before concluding: "As literary criticism and theory continue to address conceptions of disability across different cultural and historical contexts, new forms of knowledge proliferate" (38). [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.1]
- Date
- 2015
- Gower Subjects
- Biography of Gower
Minor Latin Poetry