Sight Loss and the Tethered Self in 21st Century Novels

This book explores the representation of visual impairment in twenty-first-century novels. It arises from new research situated within the growing field of blind studies, engaging with the scholarship of David Bolt, Julia Miele Rodas, Devon Healey, Heather Tilley and Martha Stoddard Holmes, among others. Multiple definitions of the term ‘tethering’ are employed in the exploration of relationships between disabled and non-disabled protagonists, who experience varying degrees of constraint or liberation. After a contextualising Introduction that also analyses Joseph Conrad’s The End of the Tether and Wilkie Collins’ The Dead Secret and Poor Miss Finch, each chapter focuses on a particular literary genre, beginning with biofiction before proceeding to romance and then historical fiction. These chapters consider nuanced and complex representations of sight loss (and, more briefly, hearing loss) in contemporary novels by David Lodge, Julian Barnes, Shrabani Basu, Eric Lindstrom, Lucy May Lennox and Anthony Doerr. The fictional texts discussed are recent and have received relatively little scholarly attention to date, allowing for cutting-edge analysis and response. The discussion of sight loss is informed experientially by the author's own severe visual impairment.