Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film

Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film includes a collection of essays exploring the ways in which recent literary and filmic representations of vulnerability depict embodied forms of vulnerability across languages, media, genres, countries, and traditions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The volume gathers 12 chapters penned by scholars from Japan, the USA, Canada, and Spain which look into the representation of vulnerability in human bodies and subjectivities. Not only is the array of genres covered in this volume significant— from narrative, drama, poetry, (auto)documentary, or film— in fiction and nonfiction, but also the varied cultural and linguistic coordinates of the literary and filmic texts scrutinized—from the USA, Canada, Spain, France, the Middle East, to Japan. Readers who decide to open the cover of this volume will benefit from becoming familiar with a relatively old topic— that of vulnerability— from a new perspective, so that they can consider the great potential of this critical concept anew.

Embodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film is a mind-expanding voyage into vulnerability, the many-sided keyword of our times.-Dr Elisabetta Marino, Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Rome, ItalyEmbodied VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film is a highly significant collection of essays that reassess conceptualizations of vulnerability, linking it with material aspects of the body and addressing the challenges that representing vulnerabilities posit for artists, audiences and readers.Dr. Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp, Full Professor of English, University of Bonn, GermanyThis exciting collection contributes vitally to the emerging field of vulnerability studies. By examining diverse representations in literature and visual culture, it argues that ambiguous experiences of embodied vulnerability can be resignified to enable agency. Culturally interventionist, these essays advocate a vulnerability ethics involving care and relationality and so challenge entrenched conditions of precarity. Janet M. Wilson, Emerita Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies, University of Northampton UK

Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández is Senior Lecturer of English in the Department of English and German at the University of Córdoba (Spain) and a founding member of the Challenging Precarity network. She has recently co-edited Representing Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2023).Miriam Fernández-Santiago is Senior Lecturer of English and Head of the English Department at the University of Granada (Spain), where she teaches courses on Literatures and Cultures in English at graduate and undergraduate levels. Her current research interests focus on contemporary literature in English, critical posthumanism, vulnerability, and disability studies.