Reading Victorian Deafness

Reading Victorian Deafness is the first book to address the crucial role that deaf people, and their unique language of signs, played in Victorian culture. Drawing on a range of works, from fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, to poetry by deaf poets and life writing by deaf memoirists Harriet Martineau and John Kitto, to scientific treatises by Alexander Graham Bell and Francis Galton, Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people’s language use was a public, influential, and contentious issue in Victorian Britain. The Victorians understood signed languages in multiple, and often contradictory, ways: they were objects of fascination and revulsion, were of scientific import and literary interest, and were considered both a unique mode of human communication and a vestige of a bestial heritage. Over the course of the nineteenth century, deaf people were increasingly stripped of their linguistic and cultural rights by a widespread pedagogical and cultural movement known as “oralism,” comprising mainly hearing educators, physicians, and parents. Engaging with a group of human beings who used signs instead of speech challenged the Victorian understanding of humans as “the speaking animal” and the widespread understanding of “language” as a product of the voice. It is here that Reading Victorian Deafness offers substantial contributions to the fields of Victorian studies and disability studies. This book expands current scholarly conversations around orality, textuality, and sound while demonstrating how understandings of disability contributed to Victorian constructions of normalcy. Reading Victorian Deafness argues that deaf people were used as material test subjects for the Victorian process of understanding human language and, by extension, the definition of the human.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

What does it mean to engage in Deaf Studies and who gets to define the field? What would a truly deaf-led Deaf Studies research program look like? What are the research practices of deaf scholars in Deaf Studies, and how do they relate to deaf research participants and communities? What innovations do deaf scholars deem necessary in the field of Deaf Studies? In Innovations in Deaf Studies: The Role of Deaf Scholars, volume editors Annelies Kusters, Maartje De Meulder, and Dai O'Brien and their contributing authors tackle these questions and more. Spurred by a gradual increase in the number of Deaf Studies scholars who are deaf, and by new theoretical trends in Deaf Studies, this book creates an important space for contributions from deaf researchers, to see what happens when they enter into the conversation. Innovations in Deaf Studies expertly foregrounds deaf ontologies (defined as "deaf ways of being") and how the experience of being deaf is central not only to deaf research participants' own ontologies, but also to the positionality and framework of the study as a whole. Further, this book demonstrates that the research and methodology built around those ontologies offer suggestions for new ways for the discipline to meet the challenges of the present, which includes productive and ongoing collaboration with hearing researchers. Providing fascinating perspective and insight, Kusters, De Meulder, O'Brien, and their contributors all focus on the underdeveloped strands within Deaf Studies, particularly on areas around deaf people's communities, ideologies, literature, religion, language practices, and political aspirations.

This book looks at how hearing loss among adults was experienced, viewed and treated in Britain before the National Health Service. We explore the changing status of ‘hard of hearing’ people during the nineteenth century as categorized among diverse and changing categories of ‘deafness’. Then we explore the advisory literature for managing hearing loss, and techniques for communicating with hearing aids, lip-reading and correspondence networks. From surveying the commercial selling and daily use of hearing aids, we see how adverse developments in eugenics prompted otologists to focus primarily on the prevention of deafness. The final chapter shows how hearing loss among First World War combatants prompted hearing specialists to take a more supportive approach, while it fell to the National Institute for the Deaf, formed in 1924, to defend hard of hearing people against unscrupulous hearing aid vendors. This book is suitable for both academic audiences and the general reading public. All royalties from sale of this book will be given to Action on Hearing Loss and the National Deaf Children’s Society.

The book represents a historical overview of the way the topic of gesture and sign language has been treated in the 18th century French philosophy. The texts treated are grouped into several categories based on the view they present of deafness and gesture. While some of those texts obviously view deafness and sign language in negative terms, i.e. as deficiency, others present deafness essentially as difference, i.e. as a set of competences that might provide some insights into how spoken language works. One of the arguments of the book is that these two views of deafness and sign language still represent two dominant paradigms present in the current debates on the issue. The aim of the book, therefore, is not only to provide a historical overview but to trace what might be called a “history of the present”.

Contributions by Cynthia Neese Bailes, Nina Batt, Lijun Bi, Hélène Charderon, Stuart Ching, Helene Ehriander, Xiangshu Fang, Sara Kersten-Parish, Helen Kilpatrick, Jessica Kirkness, Sung-Ae Lee, Jann Pataray-Ching, Angela Schill, Josh Simpson, John Stephens, Corinne Walsh, Nerida Wayland, and Vivian Yenika-Agbaw Children, Deafness, and Deaf Cultures in Popular Media examines how creative works have depicted what it means to be a deaf or hard of hearing child in the modern world. In this collection of critical essays, scholars discuss works that cover wide-ranging subjects and themes: growing up deaf in a hearing world, stigmas associated with deafness, rival modes of communication, friendship and discrimination, intergenerational tensions between hearing and nonhearing family members, and the complications of establishing self-identity in increasingly complex societies. Contributors explore most of the major genres of children’s literature and film, including realistic fiction, particularly young adult novels, as well as works that make deft use of humor and parody. Further, scholars consider the expressive power of multimodal forms such as graphic novel and film to depict experience from the perspective of children. Representation of the point of view of child characters is central to this body of work and to the intersections of deafness with discourses of diversity and social justice. The child point of view supports a subtle advocacy of a wider understanding of the multiple ways of being D/deaf and the capacity of D/deaf children to give meaning to their unique experiences, especially as they find themselves moving between hearing and Deaf communities. These essays will alert scholars of children’s literature, as well as the reading public, to the many representations of deafness that, like deafness itself, pervade all cultures and are not limited to specific racial or sociocultural groups.