Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation

Ato Quayson

Paper, 264 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13903-8
$25.50 / £15.00

June, 2007
Cloth, 264 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13902-1
$72.00 / £42.50

"Quayson raises illuminating points . . . and reveals how disability is perceived in a multifaceted society . . . Highly recommended." — CHOICE

"A work of literary criticism in the best sense. Ato Quayson is taking the field forward." — Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Emory University

"Ato Quayson's acutely global view offers a strong challenge to the narrow, implicitly or explicitly liberal humanist, Western focus of most scholarly work in what is now called disability studies. Broader and deeper than previous literary disability studies—broader in its international focus, deeper in the texture of its calibrated close readings—Aesthetic Nervousness is a breakthrough interdisciplinary work by a major theorist." — Susan Schweik, former Presidential Chair in Undergraduate Education for Disability Studies, the University of California, Berkeley

Related Subjects

• Literary Criticism and Theory

About the Author

Ato Quayson is professor of English and inaugural director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He taught for ten years on the Faculty of English and was also director of the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cambridge. He has also published widely on African literature, literary theory, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.

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