Overview
- Reasons that blindness is a creative and artistic force
- Argues that non-visual description is more evocative than sight-based description and that blind narrators, characters and readers engage with texts in exciting ways
- Looks at how French literature celebrates blindness for its own sake and undermines the myths of stereotypes of blindness which prevail in Western society
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Literary Disability Studies (LIDIST)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book argues that the most interesting depictions of blindness in French fiction are those which call into question and ultimately undermine the prevailing myths and stereotypes of blindness which dominate Western thought. Rather than seeing blindness as an affliction, a tragedy or even a fate worse than death, the authors examined in this study celebrate blindness for its own sake. For them it is a powerful artistic and creative force which offers new and surprising ways of describing, and relating to, reality. Canonical and lesser-known novels from a range of genres, including the roman noir, science fiction, auto-fiction and realism are analyzed in detail to show how the presence of blind characters invites the reader to abandon his or her traditional reliance on the sense of sight and engage with the world in sensual, and hitherto unexpected, ways. This book challenges everything we thought we knew about blindness and invites us to revel in the pleasures and perils of reading blind.
Reviews
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Hannah Thompson is Reader in French at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. She is the author of the popular Blind Spot Blog.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Reviewing Blindness in French Fiction, 1789–2013
Authors: Hannah Thompson
Series Title: Literary Disability Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43511-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-43510-1Published: 01 September 2017
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-43511-8Published: 18 August 2017
Series ISSN: 2947-7409
Series E-ISSN: 2947-7417
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 199
Topics: European Literature, Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature