This article sets out the initial terrain for a critical stylistics of disability exposing the linguistic structures that encode often harmful ideologies surrounding disabled people. Disabled people are represented in literature and the media in general as ‘other’, and as curiosities to be described and explained. They are represented stereotypically as pitiable, evil, burdensome, as ‘Super Cripples’ or super humans, or as self-pitying. Such depictions can be internalised by and harmful to disabled people. Analysis will need to acknowledge that disabled people are frequently foregrounded as socially deviant in representations. Areas for analysis will include the author status as disabled or non-disabled, narrative mode, and the use of disability as metaphor. However, major areas for study will be description in noun phrases, transitivity analysis and the language of appraisal and evaluation. These can be scrutinised to expose the manner in which ideologies and stereotypes of disability are encoded.

In this article I examine the evolution of the Tyneside song, 'The Blaydon Races', into a local anthem, with a focus on the contribution of the plurals lads and lasses to this status.

Disability or health-related literature has potential to shape public understanding of disability and can also play an important role in medical curricula. However, there appears to be a gap between a health humanities approach which may embrace fictional accounts and a cultural disability studies approach which is deeply sceptical of fiction written by non-disabled authors. This paper seeks to reconcile these perspectives and presents an analysis of the language used by Jonathan Franzen in his description of Parkinson’s disease in the novel The Corrections. We use detailed linguistic analysis, specifically stylistics, to identify the techniques Franzen adopts to represent aspects of impairment and disability. We describe four specific linguistic devices used in the novel: reflector mode, iconicity, body part agency and fragmentation. We show how stylistics offers a unique analytical perspective for understanding representations of disability and impairment. However, we emphasise the need to promote critical and even resistant understandings of such representations and we discuss the potential role of patient/service user input to assess fictional accounts.

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