This book takes up the task of mapping discursive shifts in the representation of disability in dystopian youth texts across four historical periods where major social, cultural and political shifts were occurring in the lives of many disabled people. By focusing on dystopian texts, which the author argues act as sites for challenging or reinforcing dominant belief systems and ways of being, this study explores the potential of literature, film and television to act as a catalyst of change in the representation of disability. In addition, this work discusses the texts and technologies that continue to perpetuate questionable and often competing discourses on the subject.
Introduction: Worlds of Difference.
Chapter 1 -Goblin-ology: Eugenics
and hysterisation in George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872).-
Chapter 2 -"Lonely, tender, passionate heart": Melancholy and Isolation in
Dinah Mulock Craik's The Little Lame Prince and his Traveling Cloak (1875).-
Chapter 3 -Building Beasties: Disability, Imperialism and Violence in William
Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954).
Chapter 4 -On the Fringes: John
Wyndham's The Chrysalids (1955) and Technologies of the Self.
Chapter 5 -"A
Perversion of Nature? How Exciting!": Tim Burton's Edward
Scissorhands (1990), the Freak, the Monster and the Limits of Inclusion.-
Chapter 6 -"Blind. Deaf. Disabled. Wheelchair": Community, History and
Resistance in Jane Stemp's Waterbound (1995).
Chapter 7 -"This Magic Keeps
Me Alive, but it's Making Me Crazy!": Amputation, Madness and Control
in Adventure Time (2009-2018).
Chapter 8 -"Loss is Loss is Loss": Embodying
the Family-as-Trauma in Julianna Baggott's Pure (2012).
Dylan Holdsworth is a casual academic at Deakin University. He was awarded his PhD in 2017, and his research interests include disability, gender, genre, childrens and young adult literature, and Australian literature. He has published chapters in Disability and Masculinities: Corporeality, Pedagogy and the Critique of Otherness (2017), Affect, Emotion, and Childrens Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (2017), and Migratory Men: Place, Transnationalism and Masculinities (2023), as well as an article on crip-trans ghosts in paranormal horror cinema in Writing from Below (2023) with Tom Sandercock.
