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In a post-1960s environment concerned with social justice, one would expect novels representing disabled children to focus on unjust discrimination as well as the need for disabling social conditions to undergo change and communities to receive sensitivity training. Likewise, since the discourse of disability studies has shifted from "coping" to understanding the unique gifts of the disabled, from cataloging conditions of disability to critique of what Robert McRuer calls compulsory able-bodiedness, one would expect literature focusing on individuals with disabilities to shiftto the new paradigm of differently abled children. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), Mark Haddon's popular crossover novel, indeed does this sort of cultural work. The character of Christopher Boone, who is generally understood as a teen with Asperger syndrome but who is never labeled as such in the novel, provides a study of a unique consciousness that processes the world and the self in exceptional ways. Yet artistic focus on the distinct ways a child might defamiliarize the world and hold thought patterns at odds with social conventions is not new; this technique is the hallmark of the modern novel, as seen in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which initiated intense scrutiny of a child's unique cognitive processes both to situate the relationship between child and environment and mark the child's difference from social norms.
Twain's modern voice as Huck established developmental psychology as the core feature of human subjectivity, separated the self from the social world, and explored the relationship between development and environment-as environment was internalized and processed in the young mind. In his mind Huck continually ruminates on things Pap, the Widow, and Tom have said, resulting in inner dialogues and moral confusions as he faces new experiences. The depth of consciousness achieved, as Albert Stone demonstrates, embodies the fruition of Twain's apprenticeship writings, his literary culture's interest in children's literature, and the period's gradual departure from the unrealistic, wooden child characters permeating fiction in the earlier portion of the nineteenth century. Yet as a combination of Twain's interests in boyhood, satire, crass humor, and even dime novels-influential traditions marked in Stone's study-Huck is both a child and a means for incisive satire delivered in deadpan voice. Several critics have noted the way...