Dysfluent in Fiction
Vocal Disability and Nineteenth-Century Literature
Author(s)
McGuire, Riley
Collection
Knowledge Unlatched (KU)Number
8753d7fa-ea79-4148-9c6c-e8da27d6e972Language
EnglishAbstract
In Dysfluent in Fiction, Riley McGuire unspools a literary history of vocal disability in the nineteenth century, arguing that this underexamined literary trope helps us to understand vocal hierarchies that still structure our present. Adopting the term “dysfluency” to show departure from normative expectations of pace, pitch, and fluency, McGuire reveals how dysfluent speech populates an enormous number of nineteenth-century texts and played a formative role in the lives of some of the period’s most influential writers. Dysfluent in Fiction examines anglophone literature during the long nineteenth century in both England and America by authors such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Frederick Douglass. Examples of dysfluencies across genres include lisping lovers, a baby-talking fairy, a mute detective, various disabilities in narratives of enslavement, and more. These representations show how disabled speech was both stigmatized and celebrated in ways that clarify our contemporary response to the spectrum of human articulation and that are a vocal corollary to current notions of neurodiversity. Dysfluency’s power, McGuire contends, lies in its denial that a single mode of articulation is possible, let alone desirable.
Keywords
Literary Criticism; European; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Literary Criticism; American; Literary Criticism; Modern; 19th CenturyDOI
https://doi.org/10.26818/9780814215869ISBN
9780814215869Publisher
The Ohio State University PressPublisher website
https://ohiostatepress.org/Publication date and place
2025Grantor
Imprint
The Ohio State University PressClassification
Literature: history & criticism
Literature: history & criticism
Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900