A ‘STRANGE BIRD’ IN A ‘STRANGE WORLD’: ABILITY AND DIFFERENCE IN H. G. WELLS’S THE WONDERFUL VISIT

Abstract

This article applies key concepts of disability studies to H. G. Wells’s The Wonderful Visit, in order to show that Wells’s corpus is an early and progressive source for depictions of contemporary tenets of disability studies. First, the article reviews representations of disability in late-Victorian literature and Wells’s own experiences with disability. Alongside this, the concepts of impairment, disability, and the medical model are established. Next, the article performs a close reading of the text and highlights where Wells excels at practising a proto-disability studies stance, additionally pointing to areas where he reverts to a normative stance. Lastly, this article considers Wells’s minimal appearance in conversations at the intersections of disability studies and Wellsian scholarship, claiming that Wells’s works open significant opportunities in both Wellsian and disability studies scholarship to re-envision perceptions of ability and difference in new and incisive ways.