This introduction begins by setting up the core question of this book: why is it that disability is still frequently used as a metaphor, despite awareness that this is harmful – and what can we as readers and receivers of classical texts do about it? The role played by spectators, by models of reception, and by ways of understanding vision in this problem are underlined. The chapter introduces the concept of assemblage theory, seeing it as something that arises out of the focus on the reader evident in reception theory’s beginnings. It draws out some of the benefits of an assemblage-thinking model, weighing them against other ways of understanding reception and relation. It closes with some examination of the various activisms and limitations evident throughout the book.

In this contribution, we explore the question of whether there is reason to maintain the traditional view of language aptitude as a relatively fixed trait that is resistant to experience, or if it should instead be seen as a rather flexible and acquirable skill. Both bilingualism and visual loss have been reported to have enhancing effects on language-related as well as non-linguistic cognition, but few studies have focused on their effects on language aptitude specifically, especially in the case of blindness. In a study of 80 blind and sighted L1 and L2 speakers of Swedish, we compare the relative experiential effects on the phonological aptitude of (1) having learned an L2 and having been a long-term functional and fluent bilingual in adulthood with (2) having lived with total visual deprivation for a significant period of life. The chapter closes with a discussion on what it would mean for current views on the role of age of L2 acquisition and critical period(s) if the above-average language aptitude hitherto robustly associated with adult near-native L2 learning should turn out to be nothing but an effect of L2 learning itself.

Milton's sonnets, which present Milton's self as a fictionalized persona, reveal the ways in which Milton's masculinity and his subjectivity interact in a highly masculinized poetic form. In his political and personal sonnets, Milton makes himself a vulnerable but also authoritative figure who makes his own authority through poetic form. Claiming public status while eschewing public alliances, creating enemies while claiming popularity, and naming friends while walking in solitary glory, Milton's sonnet-speakers confirm the ambivalent, tactical, and self-authorizing manhood which is Milton's default.

Different abilities enlarge the terrain of the creative trance. By demonstrating the extended capacities of human beings, challenges widen the possibilities for everyone. Not all conditions can be “cured,” but healing is always available through self-transformation. Differently abled people experience altered states in sports competitions, the Paralympics, dance, wheelchair dance, music, science, and visual art, sometimes without limbs, vision, or hearing. They share a triumph of achievement gained through accomplishing something that was at one time thought to be impossible – perhaps even by them. There are physically integrated dance and theater companies for people of all abilities and a long lineage of blind African American music professionals. The effort to confront impediments alters the neural landscapes of their brains and empowers their creative trance. As the world champion wheelchair dancer, Piotr Iwanicki says, “When I’m on the dance floor, nothing matters at all. Dancing is all my life. It’s my passion.”

Focusing on works by two early nineteenth-century African American artists – the Baltimore portrait painter Joshua Johnson and the author of The Blind African Slave (1810) Boyrereau Brinch – this chapter considers the conceptions of racialized selfhood before 1830. What can we learn from the aesthetic surfaces left by a non-white portraitist about whom not much is known, working within the genre of family portraiture? Additionally, this chapter offers a reading of the visual as central to African American textual production in the early nineteenth century. Early Black writers were keen visual theorists. Brinch’s tale “about” memory and blindness has rarely been considered in relation to the critical tradition of visual culture studies; that this has been so has reduced not only our understanding of a specific African American literary text, but also our understanding of the place of the visual in American cultural production full stop. This chapter considers Johnson’s and Brinch’s surfaces and visuality in relation to early nineteenth-century conceptions of selfhood, race, and interior depth.

Many critics struggle with defining the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as the novel offers a combined monstrosity–deformity concept that blurs the distinctions between moral and physical attributes. The critical focus on categorization, however, marginalizes Shelley’s interest in the ethics of looking, and, in particular, her interest in how looking constructs monstrosity/deformity. The novel reveals the failure of transformative vision in the case of monstrosity and deformity, and invites sympathy for the object of such failure by reiterating instances in which the uncanny is familiarized and vision is changed. The creature’s brief encounter with a blind character offers an opportunity for transformative listening, but this goes awry, and reinforces the central tragedy of the novel.

Chapter 5 brings analysis to more recent times with its focus on Tuina (Massage, 2008) by Bi Feiyu (b. 1964), a novel that explores the world of blind tuina massage therapists in Nanjing and is, ostensibly, based on conversations with real-life therapists there. Although a non-disabled person, Bi Feiyu argues that Tuina breaks away from received ways of writing about blindness and impairment more broadly to show the ‘human’ experience of blindness from within the experience of disability. The novel reveals the surprising (to the able-bodied gaze at least) ‘normalcy’ of disabled lives and emotions – greed, ambition, fear, despair, anger, love, desire and everything in between – debunking, as it does, the various prejudices surrounding the ‘world of darkness’. The way in which the novel highlights the individual/particular over the public/metaphoric certainly demonstrates its potential for the sharing of marginal perspectives and the personal reinterpretation of ‘difference’ and belonging; but, as the chapter also reveals, this does not mean that it can produce literature that fully avoids symbolism and allegory, or many of the more obvious pitfalls of the ‘narrative prosthesis’.

A number of ancient sources preserve what purports to be biographical material about Homer. While it is unlikely that any of this material is historically accurate, it does shed interesting light on ancient debates concerning the production and circulation of the Homeric epics.

Mendelian ideas were transformed from theoretical speculations into social realities after Hitler became Chancellor, informing the attitude the Nazis developed toward the mentally ill and shaping the Nazi sterilization policy. Mendelian reasoning led to the inclusion of certain disease categories (blindness, deafness, Huntington’s chorea) in the Nazi Sterilization Law of July 1933, an inclusion that later helped the Nazis to argue that their sterilization campaign was grounded in Mendelian teaching. In high schools, Mendelian theory was explained as corroborating the sterilization policy, while also posing pedagogic challenges to teachers trying to convey eugenic ideas to their students. When it came to the implementation of the sterilization law and the proceedings held in different hereditary courts, although the sterilization campaign was implemented independent of Mendelian theory, it was still informed by and imbued with Mendelian suppositions. These suppositions empowered state authorities while disempowering the victims of the sterilization campaign – the “feebleminded,” the “mentally weak” and the physically impaired. In rare cases, however, Mendelian logic was used by doctors to rebuke the sterilization of their patients.