Essaka Joshua is Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Pygmalion and Galatea (2001) and The Romantics and the May Day Tradition (2007). She won the Tyler Rigg Award for Disability Studies Scholarship in Literature and Literary Analysis in 2012.

Part I. Politics of Ability: 1. William Godwin and capacity; 2. Invigorating women: female weakness in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft; 3. Wordsworth's 'The Discharged Soldier' and the question of desert; Part II. Aesthetics of Deformity: 4. Picturesque aesthetics: theorizing deformity in the Romantic era; 5. Relational deformity in Frances Burney's Camilla; 6. Monstrous sights: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.