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Mary Shelly, Emily Bronte, And Christina Rossetti: The Literature Of Disability, Georgia E Standish

UNLV Retrospective Theses & Dissertations

Many scholarly studies have examined illness, sickness, and invalidism in British nineteenth-century fiction. Few have explored these concepts in both fiction and poetry as "disabilities." This study traces the origins of the concept of disability in the poetic and fictional representations in three nineteenth-century key women authors: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and her poetry, and Christina Rossetti's "Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets" and "Goblin Market." Significant to the early development of the concept of disability is the emergence of the related concept of normalcy in the nineteenth-century. Along with the concept of normalcy are also the …