A Word Made Flesh: Disability and Editorship in U.S. Literary Culture

FAIN: FT-291605-23

Clare Mullaney
Clemson University (Clemson, SC 29634-0001)

Research and writing of a monograph examining the relationship between authorship and disability through nineteenth and twentieth century editors and writers with a range of disabilities.

Historically, editorial work has been understood as mitigating error—whether catching misspellings or eliminating excessive turns of phrase. By contrast, my project unveils the often-invisible labor of editors who negotiate the embodied needs of writers and readers. As one of the first monographs to tether material text studies to disability studies, A Word Made Flesh: Disability and Editorship in U.S. Literary Culture reveals how publishing networks recover writing about disability without erasing marks of authors’ impairments or access needs from the page. As editorial practices in the U.S. became increasingly standardized with the proliferation of print, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century disabled writers like Emily Dickinson, Pauline Hopkins, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Helen Keller, Claude McKay, and Zelda Fitzgerald resist this textual conformity by displaying the ways non-normative bodyminds revise literary protocols.