1. This study does not take into account nineteenth- and early-twentieth century writing in Irish language. Likewise, as noted in the Introduction, in this work I define “modern” in the terms found in Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (New York: Allen Lane, 1988); I use the larger framework of “modern Irish culture” constructed in works like The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 2005).
2. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 1987), 78–9.
3. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Isobel Murray. Oxford English Novels (Oxford University Press, 1974), 25.
4. See Lennard Davis, “Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, The Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Disability Studies Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. (New York: Routledge, 1997.)
5. See Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004)