Essaka Joshua is Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Pygmalion and Galatea (2001) and The Romantics and the May Day Tradition (2007). She won the Tyler Rigg Award for Disability Studies Scholarship in Literature and Literary Analysis in 2012.

'Joshua uses writing about disability and disability theory to bring a new perspective to her analysis of these texts. As a result, this is an important contribution to literary criticism of the Romantic era. There is a larger historical significance too in her careful reading of the nuance of language and the evolution of terminology we use in our discussions of disability history.' Rosamund Oates, H-Disability

• Part I. Politics of Ability: 1. William Godwin and capacity; 2. Invigorating women: female weakness in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft; 3. Wordsworth's 'The Discharged Soldier' and the question of desert; Part II. Aesthetics of Deformity: 4. Picturesque aesthetics: theorizing deformity in the Romantic era; 5. Relational deformity in Frances Burney's Camilla; 6. Monstrous sights: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Essaka Joshua is Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Pygmalion and Galatea (2001) and The Romantics and the May Day Tradition (2007). She won the Tyler Rigg Award for Disability Studies Scholarship in Literature and Literary Analysis in 2012.

'Joshua uses writing about disability and disability theory to bring a new perspective to her analysis of these texts. As a result, this is an important contribution to literary criticism of the Romantic era. There is a larger historical significance too in her careful reading of the nuance of language and the evolution of terminology we use in our discussions of disability history.' Rosamund Oates, H-Disability

• Part I. Politics of Ability: 1. William Godwin and capacity; 2. Invigorating women: female weakness in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft; 3. Wordsworth's 'The Discharged Soldier' and the question of desert; Part II. Aesthetics of Deformity: 4. Picturesque aesthetics: theorizing deformity in the Romantic era; 5. Relational deformity in Frances Burney's Camilla; 6. Monstrous sights: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.