Books by Sonya Freeman Loftis
Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance responds to the growing concern to make S... more Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance responds to the growing concern to make Shakespeare Studies inclusive of prospective students, teachers, performers, and audiences who have occupied a historically marginalized position in relation to Shakespeare's poetry and plays. This timely collection includes essays by leading and emerging scholarly voices concerned to open interest and participation in Shakespeare to wider appreciation and use. The essays discuss topics ranging from ethically-informed pedagogy to discussions of public partnerships, from accessible theater for people with disabilities to the use of Shakespeare in technical and community colleges. Inclusive Shakespeares contributes to national conversations about the role of literature in the larger project of inclusion, using Shakespeare Studies as the medium to critically examine interactions between personal identity and academia at large.
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Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021
Shakespeare and Disability Studies argues that an understanding of disability theory is essential... more Shakespeare and Disability Studies argues that an understanding of disability theory is essential for scholars, teachers, and directors who wish to create more inclusive and accessible theatrical and pedagogical encounters with Shakespeare's plays. Focusing on issues such as accessible performances, inclusive casting, and Shakespeare-based therapy, Shakespeare and Disability Studies reinvigorates textual approaches to disability in Shakespeare by reading accessibility as an art form and exploring both the powers and potential limits of universal design in theatrical performance. The book examines the complex interdependence among the concepts of theory, access, and inclusion--demonstrating the crucial role of disability theory in building access and examining the ways that access may both open and foreclose inclusive dramatic practice. Shakespeare and Disability Studies challenges Shakespearians, from students to audience members, from classroom teachers to theatre practitioners, to consider how Shakespeare, as industry, as high art, and as cultural symbol, impacts the lived reality of those with disabled bodies and/or minds.
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New York: Routledge, 2017
Examining how postmodern audiences continue to reengage with Hamlet in spite of our culture's ove... more Examining how postmodern audiences continue to reengage with Hamlet in spite of our culture's oversaturation with this most canonical of texts, Shakespeare's Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion combines the use of adaptation theory and performance theory with explorations of avant-garde performances and other unconventional appropriations of Shakespeare's play. Shakespeare's Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion examines Shakespeare's Hamlet as a central symbol of our era's " textual exhaustion " (an era in which the reader/viewer is bombarded by text—printed, digital, and otherwise). The essays in this edited collection, divided into three sections, focus on the radical employment of Hamlet as a cultural artifact that adaptors and readers use to depart from textual " authority " (in stage and film performance, in pop-culture and multi-media appropriation, and in pedagogy).
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Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015
A disability that is only just beginning to find a place in disability studies and activism, auti... more A disability that is only just beginning to find a place in disability studies and activism, autism has engaged the public imagination. Sonya Freeman Loftis’s groundbreaking study turns to literary representations of autism or autistic behavior to discover what impact they have had on cultural stereotypes, autistic culture, and the identity politics of autism. Imagining Autism looks at literary characters widely understood as autistic, ranging from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Shaw’s Henry Higgins, Steinbeck’s Lennie Small, and Harper Lee’s Boo Radley to Mark Haddon’s boy detective Christopher Boone and Steig Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander. These powerful fictional depictions, Loftis argues, are also part of the imagined lives of the autistic, sometimes for good, sometimes threatening to undermine self-identity and the activism of the autistic community.
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New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
This book contends that the adaptation of Renaissance drama played a key role in the development ... more This book contends that the adaptation of Renaissance drama played a key role in the development of modern drama's major aesthetic movements. Shakespeare's Surrogates reveals the way that modern drama built itself in response to its Elizabethan past, ransacking the literary work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries for "new" innovations in dramatic technique and content. Indeed, playwrights central to the evolution of modern and postmodern drama often returned at key moments in their writing careers to the remains of the Renaissance. Sonya Freeman Loftis argues that for playwrights such as Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, and Heiner Müller, Shakespearean appropriation was central both to the creation of their public personas and to the development of their own dramatic canons.
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Articles by Sonya Freeman Loftis
Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture 5.1 (2023): 10-17.
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Metanarratives of Disability: Culture, Assumed Authority, and the Normative Social Order, Ed. David Bolt, Routledge, 2021. 94-105.
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The Flannery O'Connor Review 18 (2020): 96-107.
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Shakespeare Survey 72. Ed. Emma Smith. Cambridge University Press, 2019, 256-267.
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“Mental Health Issues: Madness in the Renaissance, 1450-1650” in A Cultural History of Disability in the Renaissance, edited by Susan Anderson and Liam Haydon, volume 3 of A Cultural History of Disability, general editors David Bolt and Robert McRuer, Bloomsbury, 2019. 151-166.
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Embodied Difference: Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World, edited by Richard H. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
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The Image of Disability: Essays on Media Representations, Ed. Amber George and J.L. Schatz. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2018. 107-120.
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The Disability Studies Reader, 5th ed. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge, 2016. 470-480.
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Disability Studies Quarterly 36.4 (2016).
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Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. Ed. Sujata Iyengar. New York: Routledge, 58-75, 2014
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Disability Studies Quarterly 34.4 (2014). Rpt. in Gale Literary Criticism: Short Story Criticism, Ed. Lawrence Trudeau, vol. 252, Gale/Cengage, 203-213, 2018
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SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 34. 59-74, 2014
This article explores the popular stereotype connecting creativity with mental disability, focusi... more This article explores the popular stereotype connecting creativity with mental disability, focusing on the figure of Bernard Shaw, a playwright that some proponents of neurodiversity have claimed as autistic. As the autistic community searches for historical identity, it is surprising to notice that Shaw appears on almost every list of famous figures associated with the autism spectrum: from awareness T-shirts displaying his distinctive bearded image to chat about him on the online autistic community “Wrong Planet,” this is one of the few figures in literary history that autism advocates claim with pride. While it would be folly to try to diagnose a dead writer with a neurological difference, it says something about the way that the public imagines autism (and the way that the autistic community perceives itself) that this particular author is consistently claimed as being on the spectrum. Through their presentation of heroes who are social outcasts, their celebration of eccentric individuality, and their prioritizing of logical solutions over emotional thinking, characters in works such as Pygmalion and Saint Joan align with popular conceptions of people on the spectrum. Yet the characters that have encouraged the autism community to embrace this writer point to larger cultural stereotypes about autism at the same time that they indicate the autistic community’s growing sense of unique identity.
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The Brecht Yearbook 37, 22-39, 2012
This essay applies Joseph Roach’s theory of surrogation to Edward II, exploring how the play’s ph... more This essay applies Joseph Roach’s theory of surrogation to Edward II, exploring how the play’s physical violence represents a failure in cultural surrogation. Throughout the play, Brecht uses the human body as a symbol for the literary canon, superimposing the image of tearing skin over the image of tearing paper. Edward II presents bodies that ask to be read as texts and texts that ask to be read as bodies. Thus, the body of the actor, as a vessel for cultural memory, is the constant object of metaphorical violence. In this play, the human body becomes a metaphor not only for the literary text, but also for the characters’ rapidly collapsing vision of history, a symbol of a past that is permanently bound to the present. Ultimately, Brecht’s characters use the metaphor of decaying flesh to represent the breakdown in a teleological vision of history, and tearing the skin off of the body becomes a violent metaphor for the act of literary adaptation.
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South Atlantic Review 76.3 111-127, 2011
Although Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman’s screenplay for Shakespeare in Love won an Academy Award f... more Although Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman’s screenplay for Shakespeare in Love won an Academy Award for original writing, the film’s originality has been under attack ever since its premier. In fact, the film’s script was the subject of a lawsuit in 1999, when Faye Kellerman claimed that the screenplay was based on her novel The Quality of Mercy. Yet Shakespeare is not the only ghostly playwright behind Shakespeare in Love, for the play’s depiction of its main character, Will, also takes inspiration from Bernard Shaw’s own depiction of Shakespeare in love: indeed, Stoppard’s style of adapting and responding to Shakespearean works is partly inspired by that arch-enemy of bardolatry, Bernard Shaw. While the film’s reliance on sources such as Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon’s novel No Bed for Bacon and Clemence Dane’s play Will Shakespeare—An Invention have been frequently noted, Shakespeare in Love’s reliance on a Shavian source has been completely overlooked: many of the jokes and much of the characterization in Shakespeare in Love mirrors that in Shaw’s one-act play of 1910, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Stoppard’s strong familiarity with Shaw’s canon suggests that this play may actually be one of the primary sources for Shakespeare in Love.
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Wise Blood: A Re-Consideration. Ed. John J. Han. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi Press, 389-404, 2011
This essay examines the role of Gothic imagery in O’Connor’s novel and John Huston’s 1979 film Wi... more This essay examines the role of Gothic imagery in O’Connor’s novel and John Huston’s 1979 film Wise Blood. In O’Connor’s novel, Gothic emblems of darkness and mortality point to the underlying motivation behind Hazel’s violent and irrational behavior: a fear of death drives the protagonist’s search for spiritual meaning, as he moves first away from, and then toward, Christianity. His unwillingness to face his own mortality is both the primary motivation for Hazel’s erratic behavior and a central element of an overtly Gothic reading of Wise Blood. This Gothic reading illuminates Hazel’s psychology--Hazel contemplates suicide on the train and begins his journey believing that he is actually dying. Again and again, Hazel faces various versions of himself through doubles that prefigure his own death. While these doppelgangers resemble Hazel physically, they also often look like walking corpses, serving as reminders of his own mortality. For example, O’Connor repeatedly points out that Hazel bears a strong resemblance to his grandfather. When Hazel remembers the old preacher lying in a coffin, he has a terrifying vision of his own corpse. O’Connor even associates Hazel’s run-down Essex with his failing health: the car becomes a mechanical representation of his broken body. Hazel sees his own death inscribed on the world around him. As he faces these emblems of mortality, he struggles with the tenets of the Christian faith, trying to decide if he can trust in a spiritual life after death. John Huston’s film, however, is an adaptation with its own agenda, embracing the comic side of O’Connor’s text and eliminating most of the novel’s Gothic images. Huston replaces the Gothic with the comic, translating an exploration of supernatural mystery into a comic critique of commercialism.
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Books by Sonya Freeman Loftis
Articles by Sonya Freeman Loftis