Abstract/Summary

Child characters who are chronically or terminally ill or have a range of mental or physical differences have been a key feature of children’s literature since its inception as a genre in the eighteenth century due both to the prevalence of childhood mortality and morbidity before the advent of modern hygiene and medicine and to religious and moral issues attached to the child. These characters have been the subject of critical discussions from early on in the study of children’s literature, although “disability” was not necessarily designated as a specific or separate topic. A central question in this respect is what exactly counts as “disability” and how this is identified in texts. For as with all issues of identity -- including “childhood” itself -- historical and cultural definitions shift and change, so that a retrospective account of those identities must decide either to re-define prior claims or simply to start only at the point at which the contemporary nomenclature is introduced. Yet it would seem strange to ignore the many ideas of childhood illness or mental or physical difference that occur in children’s literature from its earliest days; recent expansions in the definitions and diagnoses of disabilities also mean that the past may no longer be seen to be the more affected era in this respect. This means that in this entry, some references must be included which do not actually mention “disability” as such, nor list it as a term in their indices, for instance, but which instead have a bearing on these very issues of historical classification and judgement. In fact, it can also be argued that these difficulties after all persist to the present day, for “disability” still spans a wide range of ongoingly differing ideas and judgements, including for instance chronic illness, developmental disorders, learning difficulties and mental and physical disabilities: indeed, the very concept of dis/ability itself can be and is questioned. The way that disability and childhood are identified in (children’s) literature therefore relates importantly to key questions for all wider literary and disability theory: first in that this identification most often relies on a model of reading that draws on the idea of “representation” (the concept that (literary) texts describe “real life” characteristics) and, second, because the differing definitions of “disability” rely on different ideas about the roles that the individual, society and medicine may each play in generating such definitions and judgements.