Disability and the Environment in American Literature

"This book includes a collection of essays that explore the relationship between Disability Studies and literary ecocriticism, particularly as this relationship plays out in American literature and culture. The contributors to this collection operate from the premise that there is much to be gained for both fields by putting them in conversation, and they do so in a variety of ways. In this manner, the collection contributes to what Joni Adamson and Scott Slovic have referred to as a 'third wave of ecocriticism.' Adamson and Slovic attribute the rise of this 'third wave' to the richly diverse contributions to ecocriticism over the past decade by scholars intent on including postmodernism, ecofeminism, transnationalism, globalization, and postcolonialism into ecocritical discussions.^

The essays in Toward an Ecosomatic Paradigm extend this approach of this 'third wave' by analyzing disability from an 'environmental point of view' while simultaneously examining the environmental imagination from a disability studies perspective. More specifically, the goal of the collection is to investigate the role that literary narratives play in fostering the 'ecosomatic paradigm.' As a theoretical framework, the ecosomatic paradigm underscores the dynamic and inter-relational process wherein human mind-bodies interact with the places, both built and wild, they inhabit.