Literary Neurodiversity Studies is a field of literary criticism that uses the principle of human neurological diversity to analyze how literature (novels, short stories, poems, plays, etc.) works: the field considers how literary texts are created, how they are read, and what they mean.
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Human neurological diversity, or more simply, neurodiversity, is a concept reflecting the fact that every human mind works in its own particular, equally valid way. These means that there are many different ways that we think, feel, and sense (among other things.)
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Neurodiversity Studies is especially concerned with minds that work a bit less typically than what a given culture considers the neurological "norm"; these forms of being are called neurodivergent.
The field, in fact, challenges the very idea that there's a "normal" way that minds and bodies work.
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Neurodivergence is most easily understood by reference to modern diagnostic labels like Autism, ADHD, OCD, Dyslexia, Tourette's -- but Neurodiversity Studies is, in the larger sense, very skeptical about medical labeling, which has historically been used to pathologize and marginalize neurodivergent individuals. Indeed, the concept of neurodivergence can apply to any sort of way that a mind (and the body entwined with it) works differently, including other forms of intellectual disability, mental illness, madness, and addiction. And don't let the modern terminology confuse you: there have always been neurodivergent people, even before the invention of 20th Century diagnostic labels.
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For a convenient introduction to Neurodiversity Studies, a good place to start as Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Nick Chown, and Anna Stenning's collection Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm (New York: Routledge, 2020).
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As a form of literary criticism, Literary Neurodiversity Studies more specifically considers things like neurodivergent characters, neurodivergent authors, neurodivergent readers, and even forms of neurodivergent expression or style. It also thinks about how neurodiversity intersects with other forms of social identity, like race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability.
(Disability is especially important, because Neurodiversity Studies grew out of Disability Studies.)
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The bibliography on this site will help you find all sorts of research produced by scholars working on literature and neurodiversity. But if you're new to the field, and want to learn more, there are some important books you might want to check out first. (Click on the cover to be taken to their website.)
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​Loftis, Sonya Freeman. Imagining Autism: Fiction and Stereotypes on the Spectrum. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.
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"A disorder that is only just beginning to find a place in disability studies and activism, autism remains in large part a mystery, giving rise to both fear and fascination. Sonya Freeman Loftis's groundbreaking study examines literary representations of autism or autistic behavior to discover what impact they have had on cultural stereotypes, autistic culture, and the identity politics of autism. Imagining Autism looks at fictional characters (and an author or two) widely understood as autistic, ranging from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Harper Lee's Boo Radley to Mark Haddon's boy detective Christopher Boone and Steig Larsson's Lisbeth Salander. The silent figure trapped inside himself, the savant made famous by his other-worldly intellect, the brilliant detective linked to the criminal mastermind by their common neurology—these characters become protean symbols, stand-ins for the chaotic forces of inspiration, contagion, and disorder. They are also part of the imagined lives of the autistic, argues Loftis, sometimes for good, sometimes threatening to undermine self-identity and the activism of the autistic community."
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Yergeau, M. Remi. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
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“In Authoring Autism Yergeau defines neurodivergence as an identity—neuroqueerness—rather than an impairment. Using a queer theory framework, Yergeau notes the stereotypes that deny autistic people their humanity and the chance to define themselves while also challenging cognitive studies scholarship and its reification of the neurological passivity of autistics. She also critiques early intensive behavioral interventions—which have much in common with gay conversion therapy—and questions the ableist privileging of intentionality and diplomacy in rhetorical traditions. Using storying as her method, she presents an alternative view of autistic rhetoricity by foregrounding the cunning rhetorical abilities of autistics and by framing autism as a narrative condition wherein autistics are the best-equipped people to define their experience. Contending that autism represents a queer way of being that simultaneously embraces and rejects the rhetorical, Yergeau shows how autistic people queer the lines of rhetoric, humanity, and agency. In so doing, she demonstrates how an autistic rhetoric requires the reconceptualization of rhetoric’s very essence.”
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Rodas, Julia Miele. Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018.
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“While research on autism has sometimes focused on special talents or abilities, autism is typically characterized as impoverished or defective when it comes to language. Autistic Disturbances reveals the ways interpreters have failed to register the real creative valence of autistic language and offers a theoretical framework for understanding the distinctive aesthetics of autistic rhetoric and semiotics. Reinterpreting characteristic autistic verbal practices such as repetition in the context of a more widely respected literary canon, Julia Miele Rodas argues that autistic language is actually an essential part of mainstream literary aesthetics, visible in poetry by Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein, in novels by Charlotte Brontë and Daniel Defoe, in life writing by Andy Warhol, and even in writing by figures from popular culture.
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Autistic Disturbances pursues these resonances and explores the tensions of language and culture that lead to the classification of some verbal expression as disordered while other, similar expression enjoys prized status as literature. It identifies the most characteristic patterns of autistic expression-repetition, monologue, ejaculation, verbal ordering or list-making, and neologism-and adopts new language to describe and reimagine these categories in aesthetically productive terms. In so doing, the book seeks to redress the place of verbal autistic language, to argue for the value and complexity of autistic ways of speaking, and to invite recognition of an obscured tradition of literary autism at the very center of Anglo-American text culture.”
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Savarese, Ralph James. See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
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Available to download open access!
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"Since the 1940s researchers have been repeating claims about autistic people's limited ability to understand language, to partake in imaginative play, and to generate the complex theory of mind necessary to appreciate literature. In See It Feelingly Ralph James Savarese, an English professor whose son is one of the first nonspeaking autistics to graduate from college, challenges this view.
Discussing fictional works over a period of years with readers from across the autism spectrum, Savarese was stunned by the readers' ability to expand his understanding of texts he knew intimately. Their startling insights emerged not only from the way their different bodies and brains lined up with a story but also from their experiences of stigma and exclusion.
For Mukhopadhyay Moby-Dick is an allegory of revenge against autism, the frantic quest for a cure. The white whale represents the autist's baffling, because wordless, immersion in the sensory. Computer programmer and cyberpunk author Dora Raymaker skewers the empathetic failings of the bounty hunters in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Autistics, some studies suggest, offer instruction in embracing the nonhuman. Encountering a short story about a lonely marine biologist in Antarctica, Temple Grandin remembers her past with an uncharacteristic emotional intensity, and she reminds the reader of the myriad ways in which people can relate to fiction. Why must there be a norm?
Mixing memoir with current research in autism and cognitive literary studies, Savarese celebrates how literature springs to life through the contrasting responses of unique individuals, while helping people both on and off the spectrum to engage more richly with the world."
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Martínez Benedí, Pilar, and Ralph James Savarese. Herman Melville and Neurodiversity, or Why Hunt Difference with Harpoons? A Primitivist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury, 2024.
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Available to download open access!
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"Focusing on the difference between lower-level perceptual processes in the “neural unconscious” and higher-order thought in the frontal lobes, this open access book shows how Herman Melville sought to reclaim the fluid world of the sensory, with its precategorical and radically egalitarian impulses. By studying this previously underexamined facet of Melville's work, this book offers an essential corrective to the “pathology paradigm,” which demonizes departures from a neurological norm and feasts on pejorative categorization.
The neurodiversity movement arose precisely as a response to how so-called “mental disorders” have been described, understood, and treated. Unlike standard neuroscientific or psychiatric investigation, Melville's work doesn't strive to explain typical functioning through the negative and, in the process, to shore up a regime of normalcy. To the contrary, it exploits the lack of congealed diagnoses in the 19th Century, much more neutrally asking the question: what can an atypical body-mind do?
Steeped in current studies about autism, Alzheimer's, Capgras and Fregoli syndromes, Mirror-touch synesthesia, phantom limb syndrome, stuttering, and tinnitus, and fully conversant with Melville scholarship, Phenomenological Primitives demonstrates what the humanities can contribute to the sciences and what the sciences can contribute to the humanities."
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Be sure to also check out the other books and articles in the Bibliography. As more books in the field are released, they will be featured here!
Bergenmar, Jenny, Louise Creechan, and, Anna Stenning (eds). Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Divergent Textualities in Literature and Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2025. [Forthcoming]
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Available for pre-order!
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"Bringing together cutting-edge research on neurodiversity as an evolving theme in Disability Studies and the wider Medical Humanities, this book introduces a new, more inclusive field of scholarship for literary and cultural studies that explores the potential of neurodiverse scholarly practice in literary and cultural studies.
Bringing together a range of scholars and writers – the majority of whom identify as neurodivergent – this book critiques the assumption that writers, readers and editors share a uniform sensory, linguistic and social response to cultural production. Drawing on critical disability studies to question the idea that there is a 'normal' human subject, it moves beyond representations of neurodivergent characters and questions common depictions of neurodivergence as special talents or social deficits.
Chapters move beyond a singular focus on the representation of neurodivergence and explore what can be known or understood only when we engage in close and attentive reading to atypical deployments of language, form and genre. In essence, asking what it means in practice to perform a 'neurodivergent reading' of literary texts."
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Stenning, Anna. Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering. London: Routledge, 2024.
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Available to download open access!
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"Autism is a profoundly contested idea. The focus of this book is not what autism is or what autistic people are, but rather, it grapples with the central question: what does it take for autistic people to participate in a shared world as equals with other people?
Drawing from her close reading of a range of texts and narratives, by autistic authors, filmmakers, bloggers, and academics, Anna Stenning highlights the creativity and imagination in these accounts and also considers the possibilities that emerge when the unexpected and novel aspects of experience are attended to and afforded their due space. Approaching these narrative accounts in the context of both the Anthropocene and neoliberalism, Stenning unpacks and reframes understandings about autism and identity, agency and mattering, across sections exploring autistic intelligibility, autistic sensibility, and community-oriented collaboration and care.
By moving away from the non-autistic stories about autism that have, over time, dominated public conception of the autistic experience and relationships, as well as the cognitive and psychoanalytic paradigms that have reduced autism and autistic people to a homogeneous group, the book instead reveals the multiplicity of autistic subjectivities and their subsequent understandings of well-being and vulnerability. It calls on readers to listen to what autistic people have to say about the possibilities of resistance and solidarity against intersecting currents and eddies of power, which endanger all who challenge the neoliberal conception of Life.
A stirring and meaningful departure from atomized accounts of neurological difference, Narrating the Many Autisms ponders big questions about its topic and finds clarity and meaning in the sense-making practices of autistic individuals and groups. It will appeal to scholarly readers across the fields of disability studies, the medical humanities, cultural studies, critical psychology, sociology, anthropology, and literature."
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