Arianna Introna - Autonomist Narratives of Disability in Modern Scottish Writing : Crip Enchantments

Literary Disability Studies is the first book series dedicated to the exploration of literature and literary topics from a disability studies perspective. Focused on literary content and informed by disability theory, disability research, disability activism, and disability experience, the Palgrave Macmillan series provides a home for a growing body of advanced scholarship exploring the ways in which the literary imagination intersects with historical and contemporary attitudes toward disability. This cutting edge interdisciplinary work includes both monographs and edited collections (as well as focused research that does not fall within traditional monograph length). The series is supported by an editorial board of internationally-recognised literary scholars specialising in disability studies:

Michael Brub, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature, Pennsylvania State University, USA; G. Thomas Couser, Professor of English Emeritus, Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, USA; Michael Davidson, University of California Distinguished Professor, University of California, San Diego, USA; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Professor of Womens Studies and English, Emory University, Atlanta, USA; Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson, Professor of English Emerita, Miami University, Ohio, USA. For information about submitting a Literary Disability Studies book proposal, please contact the series editors: David Bolt (boltd@hope.ac.uk), Elizabeth J. Donaldson (edonalds@nyit.edu), and/or Julia Miele Rodas (Julia.Rodas@bcc.cuny.edu).

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14821

Cover illustration: Photograzia / Getty Images

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

When I started my PhD, I was ill. By the time I finished it, I was a crip autonomist Marxist.

My sister and I became disabled because I started reading disability studies. And I started reading disability studies because I wanted to make sense of why certain ways of representing body-minded difference or distress in Scottish writing spoke so powerfully to me, of why those representations were making me realise that there were different ways of being in the world. So, I started reading disability studies, and I have continued reading disability studies because I need it as a person, as a reader, as a researcher, as a Marxist, as an activist.

This book is about the crip enchantments that life, theories and books have evoked for me in the past ten years. It is a record of a quest to make sense of the ways in which the crip enchantments that I have encountered as a researcher, as an activist, as a reader of my sisters stories and as a disabled person struggling to navigate the capitalist normalcy of the world are braided together. As if rings of a Borromean knot, they circle round each other and constantly challenge us to identify how, and where, they are entangledwhile preserving the mystery of any point of entanglement. This book is the record of a quest to follow the magic that disability and research bring into the world, and to follow it into the manifold alternative realities that it makes possible.

This book develops material contained in my PhD thesis. I wish to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the scholarship which allowed me to undertake and complete my PhD, as well as my supervisors Dr Scott Hames and Dr Adrian Hunter for their unending patience, wise advice, inspiration and invaluable feedback. I would also like to thank my PhD companions Kelly, Stuart, Cleo, Ream, Allan, Nazar, Farhang, Fanny, Felix and Rana for their support and friendship, and our office F30, which does not exist anymore, for having been our home. In particular, however, I would like to thank my dear and very best friend Janet for sharing with me joys, sorrows, fears and hopes during and beyond our PhD journey.

This book is also proof that research continues after we finish our PhDs. I would like to thank Dr Gavin Miller and Dr Corey Gibson for helping me develop my postdoc project and for sharing with me their knowledge of Scottish literature and, respectively, of the medical humanities and of working-class literature. I would also like to thank Corey for giving me the opportunity to be research assistant on his project, Dreaming the Daily Darg: Working Lives in Scottish Fiction, since 1918, which has inspired me to develop key aspects of the theoretical framework of this book, which would not have existed otherwise.

I would like to thank Prof. Carla Sassi, Dr Katie Halsey, Dr Bethan Benwell, Leigh French and Gordon Asher for supporting and inspiring me, in different ways, over the past few yearswhether as teachers/educators or as researchers or as just people. And I would like to thank my Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh and my Edinburgh Coalition Against Poverty comrades, as well as the comrades I have met in spaces of autonomous learning, for helping me develop into the crip autonomist activist and researcher that I have become.