Autism and Literature

When autism was first conceptualized as a medical condition in the 1940s, an influential presumption was that to be autistic was to be profoundly limited in verbal language. Although this expectation was significantly modified by the recognition of Asperger’s syndrome (a term no longer used) in the late 20th century, it continued to be assumed that people on the autism “spectrum,” by clinical definition, lacked imagination. The weight of this assumption was such that diagnostic screening processes even counted the enjoyment of reading fiction as a possible mark against an autism diagnosis. Ironically, however—sometimes even insultingly—autism, a condition associated with disinterest in literature, became commodified in the early 2000s as a subject and theme across a range of novels by neurotypical writers. The equation was plain: autistic people were unlikely to read (let alone to create) works of fiction, and nonautistic authors became prominent cultural narrators of the condition. The result was a pattern later critiqued from within the autistic community as “the new classic autism,” and it was epitomized by neurotypically authored depictions of white men with superlative abilities (and achievements) in the sciences. This uniform and rather flat configuration seldom addressed the intersectionality of autism with further aspects of identity such as gender, race and sexuality—or even disability. In certain cases, such as Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, autism went unnamed within the actual narratives, as if autistic people did not have the agency to recognize, let alone reflect on, their condition. Autism was, in effect, being reduced to a mere literary spectacle. However, the mid-2010s brought the first wave of autistic-authored literary critical studies. These were crucial in highlighting the often harmful fallacies implicit in neurotypical literary depictions of neurodivergence. Notions of autism “representation” were dissected and even rejected. The same decade also saw an increasing range of publications by autistic authors in memoir, poetry, fiction, and interdisciplinary academic research. Key writers, including Joanne Limburg, Anand Prahlad, and M. Remi Yergeau, narrated autistic experience through childhood to adulthood; moreover, these addressed and sometimes critiqued an element of autistic identity seldom touched upon under the new classic autism: the experience of self-recognition as neurodivergent and of diagnosis itself. By the mid-2020s, autistic novelists were becoming major authors, and writers such as Madeline Ryan and Talia Hibbert helped to bring literary recognition of autistic womanhood and autistic Blackness respectively in new ways. Loosely speaking, the trajectory of autistic literary emergence is thus one from no representation, to misrepresentation, towards autistic presentation.