Autism

Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film and Director of Medical Humanities research in the School of English at the University of Leeds in the UK. He is the author of Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination (Liverpool UP, 2008) and a number of articles on disability representation.

• Preface. Part One: The Facts. 1. What we Know… Or Don’t. 2. The body, the brain and the person: biology, neurology and self. 3. The detail of diagnosis. 4. Intervention and treatment: metaphors, objects and subjects. 5. The gender question and the nature of being. 6. Conclusion: after the fact. Part Two: Social, Cultural and Political Histories. 1. Autism before modern medicine. 2. The development of child psychiatry: Kanner and Asperger. 3. Psychoanalysis, Bruno Bettelheim, parents and blame. 4. Organization and Associations. 5. The rise of neurodiversity: demands, advocacy and legislation. 6. Cultural representations: outsider and insider accounts. 7. Conclusion: history in the making. Part Three: Major Controversies. 1. A lack of consensus. 2. Causing Autism. 3. Autism and the idea of the cure. 4. Conclusion: Autism and the human - again. Afterword: Autistic Presence.

"Autism is currently a hot topic, the subject of intense discussion on the web, in the popular press, among medical researchers, and among scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This beautifully written and authoritative book engages most of the hot-button controversies around autism in a level-headed way, carefully distinguishing between the things we know for sure and the much larger collection of things we are still arguing about."—Joseph Straus, Music, Graduate Center, City University of New York"Stuart Murray’s Autism offers an efficient account of a disorder cast as the test case for individual and familial insufficiency. Epidemic, postmodern metaphor, media shibboleth, and false positive, Murray demystifies many of the sources of our current beliefs about human variation. Murray helps us to recognize the continuing terms of exclusion faced by a majority of those who live among the largest minority: human disability."—David T. Mitchell, Institute of Disabilities, Temple University