Peppis, PaulSteele, Alexander2021-11-232021-11-23https://hdl.handle.net/1794/26902Before history had christened modernism, the movement had emerged in disabled concepts and forms. It was “degenerate art,” as Hitler infamously put it, before it was modernism. Yet when scholars and many readers examine modernist literature, disability often disappears from the discussion, even though physically or cognitively impaired characters feature extensively. This dissertation considers the stakes of representing deafness, impotence, prostheses, blindness, and shell shock in literary art—especially when that task is taken up by able-bodied writers, and when encountered by their able-bodied readers. “Disabling Modernism” argues that, in distinction to adjacent early twentieth-century public discourses surrounding non-normative bodies, modernist literature significantly destabilizes and denaturalizes disability—often in historicallyunprecedented ways—while also placing dynamic images of disablement among its central concerns. Many powerful sociopolitical actors, including eugenicists, legislators, and social theorists, worked to erase disability from the public sphere in the early twentieth century. The overlooked vein of “disabling” modernist literature evoked throughout this study seeks instead to recuperate and prize that which modernity has so often desired to eradicate. “Disabling Modernism” examines literature of this period that commits to nuanced, candid, and often uncomfortable dialogues with disability. This discomfort is meant to span the spectrum of embodiment, reaching and affecting both able-bodied and disabled communities, though likely in different ways. While this dissertation centers disability within our understanding of modernism, it does so by turning primarily to under-studied writers who rarely are given space to speak, let alone to one another: Carson McCullers, Wyndham Lewis, Jean Toomer, and Rebecca West. Each chapter focuses on key texts by these authors: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940); Blast (1914) and Snooty Baronet (1932); Cane (1923); and The Return of the Soldier (1918). But the arguments made throughout reach beyond the literary and aesthetic into the historical and theoretical realm, braiding them together. These four careers are viewed as complex, even historic, sites rich with unexpected value. This dissertation displays how unnerving pasts can reveal much about the social, political, and even semiotic structure of the present, and it asks us to rethink how modernism intersects with disability.en-USAll Rights Reserved.American LiteratureBritish LiteratureCultural StudiesDisability StudiesImpairment and DisabilityModernist LiteratureElectronic Thesis or Dissertation