... others became pellagrous due to the camp diet inadequate in vitamin niacin. After examining the politics of ‘pellagra’, the chapter turns to trachoma, which caused full or partial blindness among many prisoners. While pellagra disappeared quickly, within a few years of repatriation, trachoma brought home...

...This chapter examines physical blindness and ‘second sight’, which could be linked to the Celtic bard and become markers of a poetic or prophetic vision that is apparently common in Celtic countries. It begins with an introduction of the blind harper, which was first presented by Richard Stainhurst...

...This chapter discusses blindness that can be found in the works of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, and looks at the most significant example of the blind in Byron's work: ‘the blind Old Man’. It also considers the role of the old man in the Coliseum in the Childe Harold IV, and looks...

...This chapter focuses on the figure of the blind man in the works of Mary Shelley, noting that while the blind man is not central to her works, it is still relevant enough. In Frankenstein, the blind man serves as the only person who cannot react with prejudice to the hideousness...

... artificially whitened skin, and the delicate touch of the Blind Stripling. Beginning with the suggestion that Joyce’s writing is inherently masturbatory, the chapter formulates a theory of the touching look – one that Bloom deploys, but which has its roots in those art historical trends of the eighteenth...

...After Voltaire introduced an enthusiastic French readership to Molyneux’s question and Cheselden’s case study, there followed intense interest in blindness in La Mettrie, Condillac, Diderot in his Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See (1749), and Buffon in his...

...Aspect-blindness is a condition that Wittgenstein posits in order to create a contrast to the experience of changes in aspect. This chapter examines the relationship between language-games and aspect-blindness. Can some language-games be so rigid they curtail linguistic creativity extensively...

...This chapter discusses the use of blindness in some of William Wordsworth's most important poems, and its association with the central developments in his thought. It looks at the renouncing of visionary intensity in favour of the world of habit and custom, the questions on intellectual transition...

...This chapter reviews the idea of blindness, which is central to some of the important texts of British Romanticism, and observes that the blind and the developed figures of blindness provide various ways of exploring an individual consciousness which imagines itself as lost in history. It concludes...

...This book examines the philosophical and literary background to representations of blindness and the blind in the Romantic period. In detailed studies of literary works the author shows how the topic is central to an understanding of British and Irish Romantic literature. While he considers...

...Returning to the concept and experience of blindness introduced in chapter 2, this chapter considers D. H. Lawrence’s touch-obsessed oeuvre by looking at the short novel St. Mawr (1925), and then at the short story of post-Great War damage ‘The Blind Man’ (1922). In the latter...

...This chapter discusses the idea of the unforeseeable, which is deemed as the subject of all tragedies of fate. It uses Oedipus and Samson as examples, and cites the loss of their eyes as a result of their structural blindness, or their refusal to see the obvious. The chapter stresses...

...Introducing three types of ‘blindness’. Firstly, its conception as a philosophical problem in the Enlightenment. This hinges on the so-called Molyneux Question posed by Molyneux to John Locke. Therefore, the second form of blindness is hypothetical. In its original form, the Molyneux Question...

...This chapter examines Maturana and Varela’s autopoietic theory and José Saramago’s Blindness. It argues that Blindness stages a new realist ontology of knowledge that shows striking parallels to autopoietic theory. The chapter’s first part examines Maturana...

... masculinist classical virtues like pride by following Augustine, for whom pride was pivotal to humanity’s Fall. The Reformers stressed the inverse relationship of pride to their dialogic, intersubjective model of self-knowledge. A want of self-understanding causes hermeneutic blindness – the propensity...

.... Renegotiating the relationship between the visual and the tactile, it considers the repeating motif of blindness in From A to X alongside Jacques Derrida's accounts of the hand in The Post Card and Memoirs of the Blind. Considering the hand's persistence...

...This chapter studies William Blake's characteristic themes, which were developed in close relationship with the imagery of blindness and in the light of its philosophical debates, starting with Blake's debate of the imagery of blindness and the blind with empiricist epistemology. The next section...

...This chapter discusses attaining a full perception in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats, and notes Coleridge's efforts to outline a unified creative power. Keats, on the other hand, presents a ‘material sublime’ that goes beyond ‘purgatory blind’, which is a negative blindness...

... is the wager of several texts centred on blindness, including Pierre Villey’s The World of the Blind: A Psychological Study. The chapter next considers how a range of how literary texts align fear with ‘heightened’ hearing, before focusing on the experience of civilian bombing raids during...

... Ernst Cassirer called it “the central question of eighteenth century epistemology and psychology” in 1951 is the crux of this chapter. Cassirer Ernst cataract removal Condillac Gallagher Shaun hypothetical blind man La Mettrie Julian Offray de Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm Reid...