Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

English

Advisor

Talia Schaffer

Committee Members

Jessica Yood

Amy Wan

Subject Categories

English Language and Literature

Keywords

disability, care, genre, veteran, digital, archive

Abstract

This dissertation uses digital methods to analyze a digitized archive of life writing by disabled Civil War veterans through lenses of care ethics and rhetorical genre theory. Autobiographical letters by more than 370 disabled men respond to a contest prompt open to Union veterans injured in their right arms who had to relearn penmanship. This dissertation introduces the hybrid genre of “specimens of left-hand penmanship” through several critical lenses. It critiques the rhetoric of vocational rehabilitation and examines this archive as a site for early examples of concepts from contemporary disability studies. Finally, it turns explicitly to care ethics, and uses the archive to inform a care-based reading of an understudied piece of veteran literature, Edith Wharton’s novella of the Civil War era, “The Spark.”

This work is embargoed and will be available for download on Wednesday, September 30, 2026

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