Overview
Offers the first full-length study of how the novel engages with human sleep
Makes a substantial contribution to the emerging field of ‘critical sleep studies’ and to topical debates about the history and cultural significance of slumber
Introduces an array of concepts – the Schlafroman or ‘sleep-novel’; the ‘sociable sleeper’; ‘sleep-watching’; the ‘world-from-a-bed chronotope’; ‘sleep-science fiction’ – with which to describe the novelistic history of sleep
Explores the literary pre-history of present-day anxieties about insomnia and sleep-deprivation in a ‘24/7’ society
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Sleep and the Novel is a study of representations of the sleeping body in fiction from 1800 to the present day which traces the ways in which novelists have engaged with this universal, indispensable -- but seemingly nondescript -- region of human experience. Covering the narrativization of sleep in Austen, the politicization of sleep in Dickens, the queering of sleep in Goncharov, the aestheticization of sleep in Proust, and the medicalization of sleep in contemporary fiction, it examines the ways in which novelists envision the figure of the sleeper, the meanings they discover in human sleep, and the values they attach to it. It argues that literary fiction harbours, on its margins, a “sleeping partner”, one that we can nickname the Schlafroman or “sleep-novel”, whose quiet absorption in the wordlessness and passivity of human slumber subtly complicates the imperatives of self-awareness and purposive action that traditionally govern the novel.
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Sleep and the Novel
Book Subtitle: Fictions of Somnolence from Jane Austen to the Present
Authors: Michael Greaney
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75253-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-75252-5Published: 12 April 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-09183-5Published: 24 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-75253-2Published: 04 April 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 228
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Contemporary Literature, Fiction