Elizabeth Grubgeld, Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland

Abstract

During the last decades disability life writing has become an essential means to represent the experience of living with a disability. Against the background of the memoir boom since roughly around the turn of the millennium, autobiographical disability and illness narratives have gained popularity and receive increasing public and scholarly attention. As a result, they have also become a subject of research in various academic disciplines, first and foremost in disability studies, health care studies, literary and cultural studies, sociology as well as in the wider field of the medical humanities. Since many research activities and publications in these fields predominantly focus on US-American narratives and in view of a paucity of studies of life writing by disabled people from Ireland, Elizabeth Grubgeld’s monograph Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland intends to close this persistent gap. Published in Palgrave Macmillan’s renowned book series Literary Disability Studies, it approaches the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective addressing major concerns of disability studies, literary and cultural studies as well as providing insights from Irish cultural history.