Daisy Costello
Doctoral Student in Creative Writing - Daisy’s thesis is entitled 'Glaiky: Crafting an Autistic Voice from the Northumbrian Landscape'
Research project title
Glaiky: Crafting an Autistic Voice from the Northumbrian Landscape
Supervisors
Prof Preti Taneja + Prof Alex Pheby
Contact details
Email: d.f.costello2@newcastle.ac.uk
Research Interests:
- Autism in Women and Girls
- Disability Studies & Crip Theory
- The Modernist Novel
- North East Dialect(s)
- Rural Northumberland
- ‘Autiebiographical’ Writing
A brief outline of my research project
Glaiky (Geordie, pejorative: odd-mannered, foolish, thoughtless) is a novel of feminist adult literary fiction, narrated by my protagonist, Pearl, from her tween years through to her twenties. It is informed by my lived experience as a North East-born writer diagnosed with autism, and by modernist formal techniques. The novel is set in Northumberland; time spent writing receptively ‘on-site’ at the novel’s rural settings is a crucial part of the creative process.
My critical work interrogates the portrayal of cognitive difference, and its configuration in terms of disability gain and deficit, sensory experience, gender, sexuality and class, in selected modernist texts. I compare fictional portrayals of cognitive difference and autism to non-fictional, autistic-authored – or ‘autiebiographical’ - writings.