Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity Hardcover

India

Lee Scrivner

Poets, journalists, and doctors of the Victorian period found themselves in near-universal agreement that modernity and sleep were somehow incompatible, imagining that the new, cutting-edge technologies - the telegraph, telephone, the electric light, and the railway - were perpetually encroaching upon the night and the mind to interrupt normal sleep cycles. This book explores the theories surrounding this history of modern insomnia, how the modern world is essentially 'Becoming Insomniac.' It investigates what makes the sleepless condition so special - involving strange paradoxes of attention and volition - and shows how psychologists, philosophers and literary artists worked to articulate its phenomena, its causes, and its potential cures.

1137268735

9781137268730

English

Palgrave MacMillan

24 Sep 2014

257

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?azici University in Istanbul, Turkey. He currently resides in Colombia with his wife and three sons.

...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