Date of Award
1-1-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in English
First Advisor
Karen Raber
Second Advisor
Ari Friedlander
Third Advisor
Sarah Baechle
School
University of Mississippi
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
This dissertation examines representations of neurodivergence in early modern English drama and their relationship to race-making in the period, arguing that dramatists used specific forms of neurodivergence to construct characters as racialized others and that this representational strategy participated in a broad cultural attribution of an idealized neurotypicality to a construction of the person in which the high-status white Protestant English men represented the rational, politically enfranchised standard human subject. Drawing on the thought of theorists including Sylvia Wynter and Nick Walker, the chapters of this dissertation explore how playwrights such as William Shakespeare staged cognitive and behavioral diversity and the ways they used that diversity to craft and reinforce lines of essentializing racial demarcation through the enforcement of neuronormative cultural mores. The main plays examined are The Longer Thou Livest, The More Fool Thou Art by William Wager, Epicoene by Ben Jonson, The Antipodes by Richard Brome, and William Shakespeare’s plays Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, Othello, and The Tempest. A variety of other early modern texts provide context, and some attention is paid to more recent works that reflect the ongoing cultural impact of this dissertation’s foci. Additionally, this dissertation views the 16th- and 17th-century interplay between race and neurodiversity with an eye toward their ongoing influences on society today, uncovering genealogies of interrelated present-day inequities in early modern colonialism and enslavement and identifying throughlines between the critical though of activists for racial justice and neurodiversity activism.
Recommended Citation
Bartlett, Bridget, "Neurodiversity and Racial Formation in Early Modern English Drama" (2025). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3242.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/3242