In the opening pages of her excellent book, Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, Clare Walker Gore states her goal to demonstrate the potential that disability holds for literary criticism: not just what novels have to offer scholars of disability, but also what attention to disability has to offer the literary critic. Walker Gore explores the work disabled characters perform to allow authors to experiment with the formal qualities of literary texts. She emphasizes that close attention to embodiment and characterization may help literary scholars interested in disability studies avoid the straightforward alignment of person and character. With this argument, Walker Gore makes an important intervention in Victorian studies, literary scholarship, and disability studies.

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