Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. Examining the intersection of disability and genre in popular works of horror, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and romance published since the late 1960s, Disability, Literature, Genre is a major contribution to both cultural disability studies and genre fiction studies. Drawing on recent work on affect and emotion, the book explores how disability makes us feel, and how those feelings shape interpersonal and fictional encounters. Written in a clear and accessible style, Disability, Literature, Genre offers a timely reflection on the rapidly growing body of scholarship on disability representation, as well as an innovative new theorisation of genre. By reconceptualising genre reading as an affective process, Ria Cheyne establishes genre fiction as a key site of investigation for disability studies. She argues that genre fiction’s unique combination of affectivity and reflexivity makes it ideally suited to the production of reflexive representations of disability: representations which encourage the reader to reflect upon what they understand about disability, and potentially to rethink it. Examining the affective—and effective—power of disability representations in a wide range of popular genre fiction, this book will be essential reading for academics in disability studies, literary studies, popular culture studies, and the medical humanities. Disability, Literature, Genre brings cultural disability studies and genre fiction studies into dialogue for the first time. Analysing representations of disability in contemporary science fiction, romance, fantasy, horror, and crime fiction, it offers new and transformative insights into both the workings of genre and the affective power of disability. 'It is a stimulating study which brings together a diverse number of contemporary examples from different kinds of genre fiction and examines representations of disability through their relationship with affect. Cheyne’s text delivers an insightful analysis of the conjunction of disability studies, genre studies, and affect studies, and it builds a convincing connection among these three pillars. [...] It is an ambitious undertaking to extend the already complex theoretical discussion; yet Cheyne manages to pay equal, in-depth attention to each in her examination of the representative examples she has selected. [...] Disability, Literature, Gen