Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity

by L. Scrivner

Overview

A study of the history of modern insomnia, this book explores how poets, journalists, and doctors of the Victorian period found themselves in near-universal agreement that modernity and sleep were somehow incompatible. It investigates how psychologists, philosophers and literary artists worked to articulate its causes, and its potential cures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137268747
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	09/24/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	257
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Lee Scrivner has taught English and the Humanities at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA; The University of London, Birkbeck, UK; and at Bo?aziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. He currently resides in Colombia with his wife and three sons.

Table of Contents

Prologomenon 1. A Modern Insomnia 2. The Freeing of the Will 3. The Narrowing of the Attention 4. In Vicious Circles: The Physiologies of Exhaustion 5. Mental Hyperactivity and the Hematologies of Sleep 6. Psychologorrhea 7. Slumber and Self Subdivided 8. Prostheses and Antitheses 9. Insomniac Modernism 10. Volitional Regress and Egress

Editorial Reviews

"...richly detailed and thorough in its research, Becoming Insomniac will no doubt prove a piquant counterpoint and complement to works such as Anson Rabinbach's The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (1990). Certainly, Scrivner has produced a novel and engaging study. Through uniting psychological, philosophical and literary perspectives, his history occupies a singular interdisciplinary nexus, offering much to the evaluation of insomnia as it was perceived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and indeed in the Internet age." - Eleanor Dobson, Cultural History

From the Publisher