Aesthetic Nervousness

This groundbreaking literary analysis examines how physical disability disrupts narrative conventions across major works by Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and J.M. Coetzee. Ato Quayson introduces the powerful concept of "aesthetic nervousness" to describe the formal unease that emerges when disabled characters challenge literary structures and reader expectations. Through cross-cultural examination of disability representation, the book reveals how narratives themselves become unsettled by physical difference, creating formal tensions that mirror societal discomfort with non-normative bodies.

What makes this study particularly compelling is its refusal to treat disability as mere metaphor or symbolic device, instead showing how disabled presence fundamentally reorganizes literary form. Readers interested in disability studies, postcolonial literature, and narrative theory will find Quayson's framework transformative for understanding how marginalized bodies expose the provisional nature of both physical and textual structures. The book ultimately demonstrates how literature's formal anxieties about disability reveal deeper cultural anxieties about human vulnerability and embodiment.