Disability in Wonderland

Adult-directed utopian fiction has historically rejected depictions of persons with disabilities, underrepresenting a community that comprises an estimated 15% of the world’s population. From the earliest stories of utopias written for and about children, however, persons with disabilities have been included in abundance, and are central to classic narratives like The Wizard of Oz and Winnie the Pooh. In a perfect world centered on children and their caretakers, these works argue, characters with a diverse range of bodies and minds must flourish. Spanning from Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice in Wonderland to Jordan Peele’s 2019 film Us, this examination of the wonderland demonstrates the role that bodily and neurological diversity plays in an ever-popular subgenre.

Amanda Martin Sandino is a lecturer in critical gender studies at the University of California, San Diego. The focus of her work looks at the intersections of futurity, disability, and fantasy.

Amanda Martin Sandino

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 200
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2023
pISBN: 978-1-4766-8303-4
eISBN: 978-1-4766-5020-3
Imprint: McFarland

Preface  1
Introduction  11
Chapter 1
Crip Futurity and Literary Utopias  33
Chapter 2
Finding Criptopia in Baum’s Oz Series  69
Chapter 3
Middle Era Wonderlands: A Turn to the Dark Side  94
Chapter 4
Alienation and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory  105
Chapter 5
Nostalgia, Fan Fiction, and the Wayward Children Series  117
Chapter 6
The Underland and the Rejection of the Medical Model of Disability  137
Chapter 7
Alice in the Underland  157
Conclusions  170
Chapter Notes  175
Works Cited  177
Index  191