1. Introduction: on reading disability in literature Clare Barker and Stuart Murray; Part I. Across Literatures: 2. Monsters, saints, and sinners: disability in Medieval literature Edward Wheatley; 3. Early modern literature and disability studies Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood; 4. Disability and deformity: function impairment and aesthetics in the long eighteenth century Essaka Joshua; 5. Embodying affliction in nineteenth-century fiction Martha Stoddard Holmes; 6. Paralyzed modernities and biofutures: bodies and minds in modern literature Michael Davidson; 7. The ambiguities of inclusion: disability in contemporary literature Stuart Murray; 8. 'Radiant affliction': disability narratives in postcolonial literature Clare Barker; Part II. Across Critical Methods: 9. Disability and the edges of intersectionality Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim; 10. The world-making potential of contemporary crip/queer literary and cultural production Robert McRuer; 11. Race and disability in US literature Michelle Jarman; 12. Disability and women's writing Sami Schalk; 13. Disability in genre fiction Ria Cheyne; 14. Signifying selves: disability and life writing G. Thomas Couser; 15. Disability rhetorics Jay Dolmage; 16. Afterword Petra Kuppers.