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    Blindness and writing: from Wordsworth to Gissing

    Tilley, Heather (2017) Blindness and writing: from Wordsworth to Gissing. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108151863.

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    Abstract

    In this innovative and important study, Heather Tilley examines the huge shifts that took place in the experience and conceptualisation of blindness during the nineteenth century, and demonstrates how new writing technologies for blind people had transformative effects on literary culture. Considering the ways in which visually-impaired people used textual means to shape their own identities, the book argues that blindness was also a significant trope through which writers reflected on the act of crafting literary form. Supported by an illuminating range of archival material (including unpublished letters from Wordsworth's circle, early ophthalmologic texts, embossed books, and autobiographies) this is a rich account of blind people's experience, and reveals the close, and often surprising personal engagement that canonical writers had with visual impairment. Drawing on the insights of disability studies and cultural phenomenology, Tilley highlights the importance of attending to embodied experience in the production and consumption of texts.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Book
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): Blindness, Victorian Studies
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Research Centres and Institutes: Nineteenth-Century Studies, Centre for
    Depositing User: Heather Tilley
    Date Deposited: 06 Jun 2019 05:48
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:44
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/22981

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