In this provocative study, Pilar Martķnez Benedķ and Ralph James Savarese reveal the great anticipator Herman Melvilles illumination of the hidden life of the sensory and the neural unconscious. In a work more dialogic than diagnostic, Martķnez Benedķ and Savarese explore Melvilles advocacy for the perceptual and his ardent overcoming of biased categories and limiting social constructs. They cast wildchild and cosmopolitan Melville as the bard of neuroatypicality. -- Professor Suzanne Keen, Scripps College, USA Busting the false binary of frontal-lobe rationalism and neural-subject feeling, and demonstrating instead the critical adjacency of the two, Martķnez-Benedķ and Savarese in tight, revealing, and always engaging treatments of a full range of Melville writings blend science, humanities, and the logics of neurodiversity to unpack for us new ways of reading literature and new ways of exploring the sources of Melvilles creativity. -- John Bryant, author of 'Melville Unfolding' and 'Herman Melville: A Half Known Life' Benedķ and Savarese reveal the many ways Melville anticipates and explores embodied cognition, how he builds characters from the senses up, eschewing categorization of the wayward human subject. This is a thoughtful, passionate, and admirable reappraisal of Melville that closes the gap between the humanities and the sciences. * Richard Ruppel is Professor of English at Chapman University, USA * So long as the bulk of our mental lives works to forget the sensorial vastness on which were rocked (from which were stranded), Melvilles assertion of worldly strangeness (not least our own) is needful boon. Herman Melville and Neurodiversity returns us to the exhilaration and discomfiture of this neural field with care and aplomb. The case it makes for tending to Melvillean textualitys disarming noise is a bracing resource for those of us drawn to the obscure infrastructures on which consciousness is waged. * Michael Snediker, author of Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment and Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions * Makes a significant contribution to Melville studies and shows how cognitive and neurodiversity studies can enhance our understanding of literary works. * Christopher Ohge, Senior Lecturer in Digital Approaches to Literature, School of Advanced Study University of London, UK *
