{"id":266655,"date":"2025-04-23T10:00:34","date_gmt":"2025-04-23T14:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/?p=266655"},"modified":"2025-04-23T15:45:36","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T19:45:36","slug":"foss-joins-editorial-board-publishes-book-with-uva-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webarchive.umw.edu\/eagleeye\/2025\/04\/23\/foss-joins-editorial-board-publishes-book-with-uva-press\/","title":{"rendered":"Foss Joins Editorial Board; Publishes Book with UVA Press"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Professor<\/a>

Professor of English Chris Foss<\/p><\/div>\n

Professor of English Chris Foss has accepted an invitation to serve on the editorial board of Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture<\/i>, which publishes interdisciplinary work, both scholarly and creative, authored by autistic people and allistic allies.<\/p>\n

In addition, Foss published a new book with UVA Press titled The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde\u2019s Fairy Tales. See book.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Over the course of his remarkable career, Oscar Wilde published two volumes of fairy tales: The Happy Prince and Other Tales<\/em>\u00a0and A House of Pomegranates<\/em>. Both collections feature numerous stories with protagonists who may be said to be disability-aligned, owing to their pronounced physical differences.<\/p>\n

In Foss’s book he explores the way that Wilde\u2019s stories problematically replicate many of the Victorian era\u2019s typical responses to disability but also the ways they diverge, offering a more progressive orientation\u2014both through more sympathetic identifications with disability-aligned characters and through a self-conscious foregrounding of the mechanisms of pity and the consumption of pain. The first ever monograph to examine Wilde\u2019s work through a disability studies lens, this groundbreaking book encompasses all of his fairy tales as well as his writings during and after imprisonment. Even though Wilde unflinchingly represented the extent to which these peculiar bodies suffered rejection by society, he encouraged his readers to embrace them and to advocate for emotional responses that engage love and kindness toward both individual transformation and social change.<\/p>\n

Foss will read from his newly published book\u00a0on April 24 <\/strong>at 5:00 p.m. <\/strong>in Combs 139<\/strong>. He\u2019ll talk about and read from the book for about 30 minutes and take questions from the audience. Refreshments provided.<\/p>\n\n\t\t