Amputation in Literature and Film

“This collection accomplishes the difficult work of situating the meanings of amputation in their historical contexts, within a gendered and sexual economy organized around shifting power relations. In this way, the book brings a sophisticated analysis rooted in disability studies to the examination of amputation as a signifier and as a material reality.” —Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, CUNY, USA Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of “Loss” explores the many ways in which literature and film have engaged with the subject of amputation. The scholars featured in this volume draw upon a wide variety of texts, both lesser-known and canonical, across historical periods and language traditions to interrogate the intersections of disability studies with social, political, cultural, and philosophical concerns. Whether focusing on ancient texts by Zhuangzi or Ovid, renaissance drama, folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm, novels or silent film, the chapters in this volume highlight the dialectics of “loss” and “gain” in narratives of amputation to encourage critical dialogue and forge an integrated, embodied understanding of experiences of impairment in which mind and body, metaphor and materiality, theory and politics are considered as interrelated and interacting aspects of disability and ability. Erik Grayson is Associate Professor of English at Northampton Community College, USA. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of English at Wartburg College, USA, and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Luther College, USA. He has published essays on J.M. Coetzee, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Don DeLillo, and Jamaica Kincaid, among others. Maren Scheurer is Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She is the author of Transferences: The Aesthetics andPoetics of the Therapeutic Relationship (2019) and co-editor, with Susan Bainbrigge, of Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter: Psychoanalysis, Talking Therapies and Creative Practice (2020). With Aimee Pozorski, she serves as executive co-editor of Philip Roth Studies.