The history of the novel, argues Jason S. Farr, is deeply conversant with deaf history. With this book, Farr shows that what we now identify as novels emerged as popular print forms over the same period that deaf education began to appear in Western Europe. This temporal overlap is not merely coincidental: deaf ways of knowing resonate across early print literary culture in significant ways. British authors from this period—including Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, and Frances Burney—create deafened tropes such as signed language, gestural communication, mishearing, vibration, silence, and multisensory perception in their characters and plots. Farr also engages the literary work of British and French deaf authors such as Charles Shirreff, Pierre Desloges, and Saboureux de Fontenay, who rearranged expected sensory relationships by narrating their use of signed language, visuality, and resonance.

  By focusing on deafness's cultural presence—a widely misunderstood, marginalized social location that nevertheless became central to philosophical enquiry and literary creation during the Enlightenment—Farr offers a surprising literary history that illuminates how the groundbreaking fictional developments of the eighteenth century integrated deaf and disabled epistemologies.