Monographs by Essaka Joshua
Cambridge Elements in the Gothic. Cambridge University Press. Series eds. Dale Townshend and Ange... more Cambridge Elements in the Gothic. Cambridge University Press. Series eds. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (under contract, due April 2025)
See chapters section for abstracts. Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Essaka Joshua ... more See chapters section for abstracts. Forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Essaka Joshua provides a disability studies theorized account of physical disability in Romantic era literature. The first part of the study focuses on the politics of ability, revealing the centrality of capacity and weakness concepts to the egalitarian politics of the 1790s, and the importance of desert theory to debates about sentiment and the charitable relief of impaired soldiers. The second part centres on the aesthetics of deformity as distinct from discussions of ability. Joshua uncovers a controversy over the use of deformity in picturesque aesthetics, offers accounts of deformity that anticipate recent disability studies theory, and discusses deformity and monstrosity as a blended category in Frankenstein. Setting aside the modern concept of disability, Joshua argues for the historical and critical value of period-specific terms.
This important contribution to both Romantic and cultural studies situates literature by Wordswor... more This important contribution to both Romantic and cultural studies situates literature by Wordsworth, Southey, Hunt, Clare, and Blake within the context of folklore and popular customs associated with May Day. Romantic responses to May Day bring into focus a range of issues now regarded as central to the writing of the period – the natural world, city life, the pastoral, regional and national identities, popular culture, cultural degeneration, and cultural difference. Essaka Joshua explores new connections between these issues in the context of a set of heterogeneous cultural practices that are rooted in the traditions and activities of diverse social groups. She shows how Romantic writers have positioned themselves in relation to what has become known as the public sphere, and the way in which they articulate an understanding of the common sphere as a site of plebeian self-expression. Joshua's nuanced account acknowledges the full complexity of class formations and inter-class relationships and permits noncanonical and canonical texts such as the Prelude, Songs of Innocence and Experience, and 'The Village Minstrel' to be reinterpreted in a cultural context that has not been previously explored by literary critics.
Pygmalion and Galatea presents an account of the development of the Pygmalion story from its orig... more Pygmalion and Galatea presents an account of the development of the Pygmalion story from its origins in early Greek myth to the twentieth century, focusing on its use in nineteenth-century British literature.
Despite interest in the story by famous authors, for example George Bernard Shaw, until now there has been no full study of the history of the Pygmalion story in print. This book represents the first effort to trace the morphology of the tale, focusing on the interaction of its many and various renarrations. Joshua follows its progress from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the most influential version of the tale, through later versions that embellish and revise the story. She analyzes the considerable rise in the story's popularity during the nineteenth century and shows how these renarrations reveal male fantasies of womanhood, giving expression to ideas on the dominance, oppression, education and controlling of women; and how Galatea's nude body is condemned, by some, as an emblem for Hellenic excess.
The author does not confine her concerns merely to the story's revelation of gender issues. She explores how clusters of Pygmalion texts disclose other interests, such as the nature of artistic creativity, the Post-Romantic interest in dream, and Victorian Hellenism's clash with moral obsession. Through this study, she demonstrates how the nineteenth century begins with a heavy preoccupation with the art-work as the embodiment of the artist's ideals and visions, and ends with the emasculation of the artist as the focus moves to the empowerment of the woman and the overturning of the patriarchal power of Pygmalion.
Articles and Chapters by Essaka Joshua
Romanticism and Race, 2024
When Henry Highland Garnet gave his influential "Call to Rebellion" speech before the National Ne... more When Henry Highland Garnet gave his influential "Call to Rebellion" speech before the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York, in 1843, he employed an important set of abolitionist tropes relating to disability. The first called attention to the injury done to a race: "Two hundred and twenty-seven years ago the first of our injured race were brought to the shores of America." 1 Here, he alludes to a moral injury while evoking the physical, mental, and emotional injuries that are caused by or symbolize enslavement. The second trope refers to intellectual abilities that were used to define racial hierarchy. Addressing the convention, Garnet warns: "your intellect has been destroyed as much as possible, and every ray of light they have attempted to shut out from your minds" (281). In this way, Garnet holds intellectual enlightenment as an ideal of citizenship. Denying education to enslaved people harms them, he argues, and causes their "oppressors themselves" ruination, as they "become weak, sensual, and rapacious" (281). The third trope references the irrationality, strength, and savagery of animals. The dehumanizing oppressors, Garnet says, "endeavor to make you as much like brutes as possible. .. They buy and sell you as though you were brute beasts" (281-83). As these examples show, the rhetoric of racial politics is deeply concerned with notions of intellectual ability as a qualifier for humanity and citizenship, and the injured body is a shorthand for the harm caused by the violence of slavery. Recent debates over injury rhetoric and visual imagery associated with physical suffering have highlighted some of the problematic aspects of this usage in the context of race. For example, Courtney R. Baker notices the resistance to talking about the vulnerability of Black people in a way that could be misconstrued as sentimental. Baker cites Debra Walker King's compelling statement about the problematic paradox of continuing to use this kind of visual and verbal image: "black people disappear while their bodies are constantly renewed as memorials to suffering."[...]
European Romantic Review, 2024
Thomas Holcroft's Deaf and Dumb (1801), an adaptation of J. N. Bouilly's L'Abbé de L'Épée (1799),... more Thomas Holcroft's Deaf and Dumb (1801), an adaptation of J. N. Bouilly's L'Abbé de L'Épée (1799), is a foundational story for deaf justice that models educational access as a route to selfdetermination for deaf people. Based on the real story of the Comte de Solar, Bouilly's play, and its many translations, recounts the story of an abandoned deaf child who is rescued by the Abbé, taught sign language and restored to his family. This article follows the progress of the tale as it is reworked by deaf and hearing writers, circulating extensively in many genres on both sides of the Atlantic over the next two hundred years. Holcroft's version is closely tied to fundraising for deaf schools, and is an important example of transatlantic exchange between deaf Anglophone and Francophone worlds. Although Holcroft's play was embraced by pioneer deaf educators, such as Laurent Clerc, its sentimentality has proved to be problematic, as this article will also explore. The Solar story is, nevertheless, significant for the attention it pays to a number of deaf justice issues: the rights to family life and name; property ownership and inheritance; education and literacy; access to communication and community; and legal protections. In 1773, the Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Épée received a twelve-year-old deaf orphan boy at his Paris institute for deaf students. The Abbé helped to prove to the satisfaction of a judge that his pupil was Guillaume-Jean-Joseph de la Fontaine Solar (1762-?), the missing Comte de Solar. The boy's identity was recognized legally, but this was overturned on appeal, when the Comte's sister challenged the ruling in 1792. The Solar story was written up as a Cause Célèbre (legal case) and circulated in news media, literature, drama, art, educational material, and on commercial products. 1 Jean-Nicolas Bouilly's popular play on the subject, L'Abbé de L'Épée, was brought to the Paris stage on 23 Frimaire, year VIII (13 December 1799), close to the tenth anniversary of the Abbé's death. 2 Napoleon, who was First Consul at the time, attended it with Josephine on its second night. 3 While successful, L'Abbé de L'Épée proved to be an irritant to the Solar family, keeping alive the deposed Comte's cause even after France had abolished its aristocratic titles. The play, nevertheless, helped the plight of De L'Epée's successor, the Abbé Sicard, who had been imprisoned and who went into exile in 1796. 4
Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2024
Annotated Bibliography. Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition. New Sections: Neo-Paganism, Dionysus an... more Annotated Bibliography. Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition. New Sections: Neo-Paganism, Dionysus and The Great God Pan; Gothic, Weird and Fantasy; Race and Myth.
Studies in Romanticism , 2023
Critical discussions of Romantic conversational practices have focused on concepts of sentiment, ... more Critical discussions of Romantic conversational practices have focused on concepts of sentiment, freedom, and the flow or ease of exchange of spoken words, and their literary representation. It has not always been apparent, however, that 'frictionless' conversation requires of the participants certain physical and sensory competencies or abilities. Disabilities that affect communication reveal much about politeness, social control, accessibility, and equity. This article offers a reading of John Poole's one act farce, Deaf as a Post (1823), as a comic play about conversational friction.
Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s, 2024
The 1830s were dominated by the cholera pandemic (1826-37) and epidemics of influenza, typhus, an... more The 1830s were dominated by the cholera pandemic (1826-37) and epidemics of influenza, typhus, and typhoid (1836-1842). These events were so important at the time that the discourse of popular protest became interwoven with the language of contagion and of sanitary reform. The reformist unrest of the 1830s was recast in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) as the 1780 Gordon riots. This chapter explores the extent to which the political and religious unrest in Barnaby Rudge mimics epidemic transmission by placing the novel alongside modern epidemiological studies of urban riots. Further, Dickens connects the 1830s discourses of epidemic and riot with madness, focusing on the problem of the undiagnosability of madness. Barnaby Rudge raises important questions about the transmission of dangerous ideas. Moreover, it connects these to the problem of individual culpability in the case of intellectual disability.
Without Hands: The Art of Sarah Biffin , 2022
Chapter in exhibition catalogue. Sarah Biffin’s (1784-1850) artwork. Co-curated by Alison Lapper ... more Chapter in exhibition catalogue. Sarah Biffin’s (1784-1850) artwork. Co-curated by Alison Lapper MBE and Emma Rutherford PhD. The exhibition is at the Philip Mould Gallery, 18-19 Pall Mall, London, UK in November-December 2022, with loans from the Wellcome Collection, Museum of Somerset, and the National Portrait Gallery
Shakespeare in the Royal Collections
Ed. Gordon McMullan, Kate Retford, Sally Barnden, and Kirsten Tambling. Oxford University Press
Special Issue edited by Essaka Joshua
Although overlooked in modern accounts of eighteenth-century aesthetics, and in discussions of ro... more Although overlooked in modern accounts of eighteenth-century aesthetics, and in discussions of romanticism, deformity is very present in the aesthetic tradition and in romantic-era concepts. We see deformity aesthetics in the form and subject matter of the romantic fragment poem and gothic literature, in political discourse, ballads, encounter poems, non-idealized and particuarlarized bodies, and in political discourse. Deformity is discussed explicitly in the debates about the picturesque. Most examples of the picturesque refer to buildings and landscapes, but the theorists also consider picturesque people. The issue of whether what is true about picturesque deformity is applicable to people with deformities, either real or represented, is a significant controversy amongst picturesque theorists.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is undeniably one of the most widely read and widely written ... more Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is undeniably one of the most widely read and widely written about novels in the English language. Its enduring interest, from both a popular and a scholarly viewpoint, has resulted in countless studies of the text from a variety of perspectives. Indeed, as its meaning and context shift depending on cultural and historical variables, the novel continues to demand frequent reinterpretation and new scholarship. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability is a breakthrough volume of critical essays on Jane Eyre, the first to examine Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre from a disability studies perspective, offering fresh insight into Brontë’s classic nineteenth-century novel from a vantage that is of growing importance both academically and culturally. Grounded in Victorian studies, the book also draws on theory and criticism in disability and cultural studies, linguistics, and gender and film studies.
Buildings often employ visual and spatial rhetorics that both persuade us of their function and d... more Buildings often employ visual and spatial rhetorics that both persuade us of their function and determine personal functionality. Architectural language is a defining feature of disability in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and a universally accessible language. In emphasizing the synecdochic relationship between gothic buildings and the disabled body, Hugo demonstrates that he is not only a pioneer in urban and architectural semantics, but that he also understands the complex symbolic relationship between architecture and the disabled body. Defining beauty as atypicality, through the gothic aesthetic, Hugo presents Notre Dame Cathedral as a uniquely drifting symbol (with its multiple meanings, its transitional status and its cultural miscegenation) with a revelatory function: it expresses disability as normative.
"The concept of the voyeuristic viewpoint competes, in eighteenth-century
historiography, with a... more "The concept of the voyeuristic viewpoint competes, in eighteenth-century
historiography, with a multi-perspectival approach to history. This article places
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the context of the historiography of Edward
Gibbon and William Godwin, arguing that the novel challenges eighteenthcentury
historiographical methods that base truth values on visual perception.
Frankenstein underscores, instead, the hierarchical superiority of words over
visual evidence, and represents blindness as a condition that encourages
rationality. Shelley characterizes this distrust of sight through extensive uses of the
“gothic gaze” – an oppressive, stigmatizing, disciplinary look that is implicated in
the definition of normalcy, in social relationships, in moral and legal culpability,
and in narrative authority."
This paper proves the attribution of two series of anonymously written articles which describe li... more This paper proves the attribution of two series of anonymously written articles which describe life at Gottingen University. They are dated 1829-30 and 1831 but refer to a slightly earlier period. The DNB, ODNB and Wellesley Index attribute them all, with some uncertainty, to the radical Scottish journalist William Weir (1802-1858) who was at Gottingen University in 1824-5. (The Romantic poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes was there 1825-9). We establish, however, that one set of articles was written by Thomas James Arnold and refers to 1823 and the other is definitely by William Weir and concentrates on 1824. Weir tantalisingly refers to a dirty student from Bristol at one point, but this is definitely not Beddoes. Both sets of articles give an interesting account of the social and intellectual environment at the university close to Beddoes’s time there, and give detailed accounts of some of the people he knew. The attribution is necessary in order to make certain that he is not mentioned in them, and that he did not write them.
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Monographs by Essaka Joshua
Essaka Joshua provides a disability studies theorized account of physical disability in Romantic era literature. The first part of the study focuses on the politics of ability, revealing the centrality of capacity and weakness concepts to the egalitarian politics of the 1790s, and the importance of desert theory to debates about sentiment and the charitable relief of impaired soldiers. The second part centres on the aesthetics of deformity as distinct from discussions of ability. Joshua uncovers a controversy over the use of deformity in picturesque aesthetics, offers accounts of deformity that anticipate recent disability studies theory, and discusses deformity and monstrosity as a blended category in Frankenstein. Setting aside the modern concept of disability, Joshua argues for the historical and critical value of period-specific terms.
Despite interest in the story by famous authors, for example George Bernard Shaw, until now there has been no full study of the history of the Pygmalion story in print. This book represents the first effort to trace the morphology of the tale, focusing on the interaction of its many and various renarrations. Joshua follows its progress from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the most influential version of the tale, through later versions that embellish and revise the story. She analyzes the considerable rise in the story's popularity during the nineteenth century and shows how these renarrations reveal male fantasies of womanhood, giving expression to ideas on the dominance, oppression, education and controlling of women; and how Galatea's nude body is condemned, by some, as an emblem for Hellenic excess.
The author does not confine her concerns merely to the story's revelation of gender issues. She explores how clusters of Pygmalion texts disclose other interests, such as the nature of artistic creativity, the Post-Romantic interest in dream, and Victorian Hellenism's clash with moral obsession. Through this study, she demonstrates how the nineteenth century begins with a heavy preoccupation with the art-work as the embodiment of the artist's ideals and visions, and ends with the emasculation of the artist as the focus moves to the empowerment of the woman and the overturning of the patriarchal power of Pygmalion.
Articles and Chapters by Essaka Joshua
historiography, with a multi-perspectival approach to history. This article places
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the context of the historiography of Edward
Gibbon and William Godwin, arguing that the novel challenges eighteenthcentury
historiographical methods that base truth values on visual perception.
Frankenstein underscores, instead, the hierarchical superiority of words over
visual evidence, and represents blindness as a condition that encourages
rationality. Shelley characterizes this distrust of sight through extensive uses of the
“gothic gaze” – an oppressive, stigmatizing, disciplinary look that is implicated in
the definition of normalcy, in social relationships, in moral and legal culpability,
and in narrative authority."
Essaka Joshua provides a disability studies theorized account of physical disability in Romantic era literature. The first part of the study focuses on the politics of ability, revealing the centrality of capacity and weakness concepts to the egalitarian politics of the 1790s, and the importance of desert theory to debates about sentiment and the charitable relief of impaired soldiers. The second part centres on the aesthetics of deformity as distinct from discussions of ability. Joshua uncovers a controversy over the use of deformity in picturesque aesthetics, offers accounts of deformity that anticipate recent disability studies theory, and discusses deformity and monstrosity as a blended category in Frankenstein. Setting aside the modern concept of disability, Joshua argues for the historical and critical value of period-specific terms.
Despite interest in the story by famous authors, for example George Bernard Shaw, until now there has been no full study of the history of the Pygmalion story in print. This book represents the first effort to trace the morphology of the tale, focusing on the interaction of its many and various renarrations. Joshua follows its progress from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the most influential version of the tale, through later versions that embellish and revise the story. She analyzes the considerable rise in the story's popularity during the nineteenth century and shows how these renarrations reveal male fantasies of womanhood, giving expression to ideas on the dominance, oppression, education and controlling of women; and how Galatea's nude body is condemned, by some, as an emblem for Hellenic excess.
The author does not confine her concerns merely to the story's revelation of gender issues. She explores how clusters of Pygmalion texts disclose other interests, such as the nature of artistic creativity, the Post-Romantic interest in dream, and Victorian Hellenism's clash with moral obsession. Through this study, she demonstrates how the nineteenth century begins with a heavy preoccupation with the art-work as the embodiment of the artist's ideals and visions, and ends with the emasculation of the artist as the focus moves to the empowerment of the woman and the overturning of the patriarchal power of Pygmalion.
historiography, with a multi-perspectival approach to history. This article places
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the context of the historiography of Edward
Gibbon and William Godwin, arguing that the novel challenges eighteenthcentury
historiographical methods that base truth values on visual perception.
Frankenstein underscores, instead, the hierarchical superiority of words over
visual evidence, and represents blindness as a condition that encourages
rationality. Shelley characterizes this distrust of sight through extensive uses of the
“gothic gaze” – an oppressive, stigmatizing, disciplinary look that is implicated in
the definition of normalcy, in social relationships, in moral and legal culpability,
and in narrative authority."
"
In particular, this resource will:
* Guide students through the main issues raised by the novel
* Analyse the novel and the critical literature relating to it
* Provide clear guidance for analysis of the novel
* Integrate National Curriculum Key Skills
* Encourage students to reflect on their own response and to consider the opinions of literary critics and reviewers
* Prepare students for external examination at Advanced Level.
Specimen essay questions are provided together with essay plans for suggested answers, plus suggestions for further reading material.
In particular, this resource will:
* Guide students through the main issues raised by the novel
* Analyse the novel and the critical literature relating to it
* Provide clear guidance for analysis of the novel
* Integrate National Curriculum Key Skills
* Encourage students to reflect on their own response and to consider the opinions of literary critics and reviewers
* Prepare students for external examination at Advanced Level.
Specimen essay questions are provided together with essay plans for suggested answers, plus suggestions for further reading material.
In particular, this resource will:
* Guide students through the main issues raised by the novel
* Analyse the novel and the critical literature relating to it
* Provide clear guidance for analysis of the novel
* Integrate National Curriculum Key Skills
* Encourage students to reflect on their own response and to consider the opinions of literary critics and reviewers
* Prepare students for external examination at Advanced Level.
Specimen essay questions are provided together with essay plans for suggested answers, plus suggestions for further reading material.
In particular, this resource will:
* Guide students through the main issues raised by the novel
* Analyse the novel and the critical literature relating to it
* Provide clear guidance for analysis of the novel
* Integrate National Curriculum Key Skills
* Encourage students to reflect on their own response and to consider the opinions of literary critics and reviewers
* Prepare students for external examination at Advanced Level.
Specimen essay questions are provided together with essay plans for suggested answers, plus suggestions for further reading material.
In particular, this resource will:
* Guide students through the main issues raised by the novel
* Analyse the novel and the critical literature relating to it
* Provide clear guidance for analysis of the novel
* Integrate National Curriculum Key Skills
* Encourage students to reflect on their own response and to consider the opinions of literary critics and reviewers
* Prepare students for external examination at Advanced Level.
Specimen essay questions are provided together with essay plans for suggested answers, plus suggestions for further reading material.
In particular, this resource will:
* Guide students through the main issues raised by the novel
* Analyse the novel and the critical literature relating to it
* Provide clear guidance for analysis of the novel
* Integrate National Curriculum Key Skills
* Encourage students to reflect on their own response and to consider the opinions of literary critics and reviewers
* Prepare students for external examination at Advanced Level.
Specimen essay questions are provided together with essay plans for suggested answers, plus suggestions for further reading material.
In particular, this resource will:
* Guide students through the main issues raised by the novel
* Analyse the novel and the critical literature relating to it
* Provide clear guidance for analysis of the novel
* Integrate National Curriculum Key Skills
* Encourage students to reflect on their own response and to consider the opinions of literary critics and reviewers
* Prepare students for external examination at Advanced Level.
Specimen essay questions are provided together with essay plans for suggested answers, plus suggestions for further reading material.
General editor of the 4 volumes and editor of vol 3.