Moving from 'the realm of hospital room to the realm of political minority' : Ever Dundas' HellSans and the Radical Contemporary Disability Novel

Glass, Rodge (2024) Moving from 'the realm of hospital room to the realm of political minority' : Ever Dundas' HellSans and the Radical Contemporary Disability Novel. Etudes Ecossaises, 23. pp. 1-16. ISSN 1240-1439 (https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesecossaises.4959)

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Abstract

In 2019, the celebrated Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky described his new book Deaf Republic as being rooted in the thinking of prominent Disability scholar Rosemary Garland-Thompson. As part of an interview for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize, for which Deaf Republic was shortlisted, Kaminsky quoted Garland-Thompson’s call in her book Extraordinary Bodies for 'the disabled body [to] move from the realm of the hospital room to the realm of political minority.' In contemporary Scottish literature, an example of this movement is the work of Ever Dundas. Set in a dystopian near-future, Dundas' 2022 novel HELLSANS makes disability itself the central conceit of a novel. This proposed article will take HELLSANS as a contemporary case study in how Scottish writers may respond to Rosemary Garland-Thompson's call, analyzing the ways in which this enacted utilizing what the author has referred to as 'queer crip women anti-heroes' (Dundas, 2022, Fantasy Hive, 26/7/22).

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