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Jean Stafford's short story "The Interior Castle" (1946) and novel The Mountain Lion (1947) theorize the entanglement of literary and physical form in midcentury representations of women's disability. Fluctuating between her modernist predecessors' interest in the relation between mind and body in the construction of a "self" and her contemporaries' exploration of grotesque embodiment, Jean Stafford's work thematizes the defaced female form. Drawing on her own experience in a disfiguring car crash, Stafford registers defacement as a form that enables, if not enforces, experimentation. Through depictions of "ruined" heads, Stafford's writing reconfigures the common understanding of disability as an individual defect into a vision of disability as a locus of critique. However, Stafford's investment in fictions of Cartesian dualism and ambivalence about the productivity of pain challenge the applicability of bodymind as a heuristic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bodies of Modernism uses the tools of literary disability studies to interrogate the pervasive and multivalent deployment of disability within transatlantic modernist texts. Drawing on works from a range of genres and geographical settings, Linett uses careful close readings to highlight modernists' conflicted relationship to normativity and to explore what these depictions reveal about early twentieth century attitudes toward disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Truman Capote's 1948 novel Other Voices, Other Rooms offers a rich vantage point from which to consider the place of disability in the modernist Bildungsroman. The novel's focus on forms of immobility, disability mentorship, and disability community both engages and revises classical and modernist Bildungsroman tropes. Here, I consider disability narrative's relationship to late modernist life writing, and therefore intervene in conventional notions of the able-bodied protagonist. I link this relationship to recent discussions of transability, or the able-bodied desire to become disabled, and I argue that representations of disability in Capote's novel may depathologize this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Olive Moore's 1930 novel Spleen investigates the appropriative relationship between experimental modernism and disability. While the text takes up the disabled aesthetics of broken statues and incapacitated narratives, it also dramatizes how modernists articulate their own exceptional capacity, mobility, and able-bodiedness in ways that reinforce eugenic understandings of disability. Specifically, Moore demonstrates how feminist and emerging queer politics in the inter-war period borrowed disabled aesthetic tropes in order to recast understandings of sexuality and gender through exceptionalism, but did so by reifying disability and race as supposedly immutable categories. This reading of Spleen, via disability studies and a detour into suffragist art vandalism, insists that modernist studies must address the legacy of appropriating disabled modes of perception and expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]