Literary Representations of Vulnerability
Vulnerability has become a key term in contemporary critical theory, ethics, trauma studies, gender studies, disability studies, postcolonial studies, and affect theory. But fiction has long engaged with vulnerability – not necessarily as weakness or exposure, but as a condition of relationality, openness, resistance, and change. From tragic protagonists to marginalized bodies and precarious subjectivities, literary texts have repeatedly returned to fragility, dependency, and risk.
