Betsy Selvam and Helen Edgar explore how this essay collection refuses to “reduce neurodiversity to a pathologised object of clinical study or passive trope in literature”.
The neurodiversity paradigm has expanded rapidly in recent years, garnering widespread interest across academic and popular discourses alike. Within literary studies, this growth has sparked, as Bradley J. Irish observes, a “growing intersectional analysis of how neurodiversity and neurodivergence are enmeshed with other categories of social being” (Irish 2025, 38).
In this vein, Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Divergent Textualities in Literature and Culture, edited by Jenny Bergenmar, Louise Creechan, and Anna Stenning, published in 2025 by Bloomsbury Publishing as part of the Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities series, offers a particular kind of excitement: scholarship that, rather than writing about neurodivergent people from the outside, thinks and perceives as many of us actually experience the world, sensorially and relationally.
The volume’s central premise is a refusal of traditional academic paradigms that reduce neurodiversity to a pathologised object of clinical study or passive trope in literature. Instead, the editors propose a critical neurodivergent framework that elevates neurodivergence to a mode of reading and creative practice, expanding humanities scholarship at large.
Building on crip theory, queer theory, critical autism studies, and neurodiversity studies, this volume recognises that occupying a neurominority position is in itself a productive site of embodied meaning-making. Consequently, it asks what literary and cultural studies might look like if neurodivergent ways of knowing were treated as foundational to the disciplines. Its chapters unfold across three interlocking sections — frameworks, readings and writings.
Neurodivergence as interpretative framework
In Part One, the chapters focus on neurodivergence as an interpretative framework. Leni Van Goidsenhoven introduces the concept of reading “porously” (or “vulnerable reading”), arguing against diagnostic reading practices that can be reductive and dehumanising (21). Rather than mining texts for symptoms, she advocates for an openness to how a neurodivergent lens can “denaturalize, destabilize and transform insights and discourses” (23). Sarinah O’Donoghue merges a literary studies framework with sensory anthropology to examine how autistic writers perceive the world around them and produce narrative, demonstrating “how divergent ways of relating to the world offer new ways of representing it” (54). This challenges traditional Western understandings of sensory perception. By analysing autistic writers, who often inhabit distinct sensory ecologies, she highlights how literature can document alternative, embodied sensory realities.
Arya Thampuran provides an intersectional intervention by combining decolonial theory and biopolitics. She analyses Eloghosa Osunde’s digital photography to trace the historical links between colonial psychiatry and contemporary norms and conventions of neurotypicality. Abs Ashley explores trans and neurodivergent (neurotrans) identities through the poetry of torrin a. greathouse, exploring neuroqueer cognition “as literary mode and creative praxis” (73), and going beyond the question of representation to discuss how a text might behave neurodivergently.
The intersectional depth of the theoretical frameworks used across the chapters in this section is noteworthy. Authors draw from decolonial, crip, queer and neuroqueer frameworks to dismantle neuronormativity and collectively argue for an openness towards alternative modes of being and becoming. In doing so, they push neurodiversity and neuroqueer theory beyond Western paradigms. By also grounding autistic-led theories such as the double empathy problem (Milton 2012) and monotropism (Murray, Lessing, and Lawson 2005) within their analyses, they reinforce the argument that neurodivergent frameworks are indispensable not only for comprehending lived experiences of neurodiversity, but also for expanding our understanding of the full spectrum of human cognition and expression.
The application of lived experience to close reading
Part Two of the book shifts from theoretical scaffolding to close reading, applying lived experience within neurodivergent frameworks directly to canonical and speculative texts.
From Chapter 5, the volume turns to close textual analysis. In “The Lifted Veil: Neurodivergence, Narrative, and Scholarship,” Louise Creechan reads the “unhappy gift of insight” of the narrator of George Eliot’s novella as an anti-narrative device that asks readers to accept a neurology functioning outside normative time and linearity (93). Fittingly, Creechan composed the chapter via a transcribed voice recording with her support worker, “lifting the veil” on a layered neurodivergent scholarly process usually hidden behind masked academic writing, which was refreshingly relatable and validating to read.
Chapter 6, “All Discourses but Mine Own Afflict Me,” turns to early modern drama. Laura Seymour rereads Morose, the misanthrope of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene (1609), as autistic utopia. She neuroqueers his sensory ways of being as a mode of self-preservation rather than pathology, showing how he adjusts his environment to meet his needs and express himself. Beneath the play’s comedy, Seymour finds a sharper critique of the social biases and communication failures that disable neurodivergent people, opening space for queer, gendered and neurodivergent ways of being.
In Chapter 7, “Words that Smack and Tremble,” Liselotte Van der Gucht examines Ingeborg Bachmann’s The Book of France (1978), arguing that a neurodivergent lens reveals the novel’s critique of ableist violence entangled with racism, masculinism and colonialism. Attending closely to Franza’s embodied communication, Van der Gucht unsettles assumptions about language and cognitive functioning, offering a framework for understanding intersecting forms of oppression.
Chapter 8 moves into speculative fiction as a powerful tool to imagine neurodivergence beyond the medical framing. Chiara Montalti’s reading of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) shares the power of stories and community. She highlights how Butler envisions a future where neurodivergent people are valued as educators and community leaders. Hyperempathy, for Montalti, exposes the relational basis of bodymind functioning, reaching beyond the racialised and neuronormative categories that usually define our neurotypes.
Jenny Bergenmar then turns to Scandinavian young adult fiction in Chapter 9, “Humorous Failures”, reading Jenny Jägerfeld’s Me on the Floor, Bleeding (2014) alongside Liv Marit Weberg’s Luckily People Don’t Notice Me (2014) and its sequel. Using queer theory, Bergenmar shows how these novels use humour and non-conforming characters to cast normativity itself as absurd, framing neurodivergence and what is sometimes classed as mental illness as a vantage point for deviating productively from ableist and temporal and capitalist expectations, through experiences many neurodivergent people may find relatable.
Alice Hagopian closes the section with a neuro-affirmative-insider reparative reading of Meursault in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), challenging a critical tradition she argues rests on stereotypes of autism and the ‘pied-noir man’. Her reading moves from Camus’s own critique of colonial injustice toward a reparative one against xenophobia and neuronormativity, opening, in her words, “a space for Meursault-like readers, for our understandings to be better valued within scholarship” (171).
Read together, these six chapters resist a diagnostic approach to literature, where neurodivergence is something to be identified and explained. Instead, each contributor treats it as an interpretive lens — a way of reading time, language, embodiment and social norms differently, shaped by the critic’s own neurodivergent perspective. Creechan’s transcribed process, Hagopian’s reparative return to Meursault, and Montalti’s attention to hyperempathy as relational rather than individual, all point to the same move — scholarship written from being neurodivergent rather than about it. It’s this insider positioning, held alongside real critical rigour, that gives Part Two its force, and that we found so validating and inspiring to read.
From reading to neurodivergent writing praxis
Part Three shifts to writing praxis, challenging and experimenting with traditional boundaries of academic writing.
Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist and Anna Nygren use an autotheoretical approach to map what they term “autistic writerness”, a mode of being together as autistic individuals within a textual space, engaging in shared sense-making as textual selves (189). Weaving together poetic writing, essay, and autoethnography, their collaboration reclaims autistic play from the clinical gaze that seeks to correct it, and creates instead a space for mutual care and textual selfhood. Their notion of an ethics of care particularly stands out: they understand this intimate, co-constructed mode of writing as a form of “co-agency”, enabling them to parallel play and flow together (196). In doing so, the chapter illuminates the epistemic injustice and violence frequently visited upon neurodivergent bodies and texts, and suggests that autistic togetherness and autistic space can be a site of resistance and healing.
James McGrath’s chapter, “AutisTime”, is a hybrid text that blends essay and poetry to explore the intersection of autism, creative imagination, and time. McGrath coins the term “AutisTime” to describe autistic ways of living that include daydreaming and alone time as profound and productive processes, pushing back against outdated psychiatric assertions that autistic people lack imagination (202). What stands out is McGrath’s poetry that appears as interventions throughout the chapter. His constraint-based poetry manifests visually and rhythmically in repeating blocks (like the chapter’s heartbeat), punctuating the text with neuro-affirming phrases.
Sophie Sexon and Hope Doherty-Harrison present their chapter entirely as an interview transcript. Their dialogue explores their “wounded attachments” to medieval literature (223). Since medieval literature frequently grapples with themes of stigma, shame, and mental illness, the authors argue this era provides a rich corpus for building a neurodivergent literary framework. The chapter is a testament to how collaboration and dialogue can serve as methodological tools for neurodivergent academics navigating ableist settings.
This section’s primary strength is its methodological boldness. By integrating poetry, dialogic formats, and autoethnography, the authors prove that form can mirror neurodivergent cognition and perception. By presenting these different forms and methodologies side by side, this section works against conforming to traditional academic scripts and encourages diverse creative-critical engagement with academic discourse.
Reading against neuronormativity
This book gathers energy across its three parts: Part One lays the theoretical ground; Part Two puts it to work on canonical and contemporary texts; and Part Three turns that same care back onto the practice of scholarship itself, asking what it means to write, not just read, as a neurodivergent person.
While keeping the book’s many strengths in mind, one notable limitation concerns its concentration of contributors in Europe, which reflects the origins of neurodiversity as an activist movement and research field within transatlantic contexts. The editors themselves acknowledge that this focus “risks the erasure of important linguistic and cultural differences” inherent to other global contexts (8). However, in laying out a robust neurodivergent literary framework and presenting a range of theoretical and methodological possibilities, the volume invites future research that extends and enhances the work presented here.
Ultimately, this volume represents radical scholarship that takes “a neurodivergent turn” in literary and cultural studies, queering a way of reading against neuronormativity (5). The invitation it offers extends beyond neurodivergent readers to anyone willing to ask what their own field might gain from more than one way of knowing, sensing and relating.
About the Authors
Betsy Selvam is an Autistic doctoral candidate in literary studies at Vellore Institute of Technology, India. Her work focuses on Autistic life writing. She is also Board Vice Chair at Stimpunks Foundation.
Helen Edgar is AuDHD and works as a writer and educator focusing on neurodivergence and disability rights in the UK. Helen is the founder of Autistic Realms. She is also Co-Creative Director of Stimpunks Foundation and Communications and Community Lead for Thriving Autistic.
References
Bergenmar, Jenny, Louise Creechan, and Anna Stenning, eds. 2025. Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Divergent Textualities in Literature and Culture. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Irish, Bradley J. 2025. Literary Neurodiversity Studies: Current and Future Directions. Springer Nature.
Milton, Damian E.M. 2012. “On the Ontological Status of Autism: The ‘Double Empathy Problem.’” Disability & Society 27 (6): 883–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008.
Murray, Dinah, Mike Lesser, and Wendy Lawson. 2005. “Attention, Monotropism and the Diagnostic Criteria for Autism.” Autism 9 (2): 139–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398.
