Towards their own identity: Persons with disabilities in English Canadian fiction.

Although they make up one of the largest physical minorities in Canada, persons with disabilities are not well represented in English Canadian fiction. Many stories that feature persons with disabilities present them in unflattering, stereotypical ways. Persons with disabilities are portrayed as dependent, pathetic characters that help perpetuate a harmful vision of what disability is. However, certain works of fiction that have been published in the last ten years--for instance, Frances Itani's Deafening and Lori Lansen's The Girls-- treat disability in a more multi-dimensional fashion. The characters in these books are independent people who use their disabilities as a means to identity and even language. With the help of disability scholars such as Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, and Erving Goffman, this thesis examines English Canadian disabled fiction as a way of establishing the idea that disability constitutes a cultural identity within Canada's multicultural mosaic and that each disability comprises its own subculture.