Abstract
The introduction locates Sleep and the Novel in relation to recent work on the history of sleep and, more generally, to the emergence of ‘critical sleep studies’ in history, sociology, anthropology and other branches of the humanities and social sciences. Positioning this work as a study of a crucial but neglected chapter in the representational history of slumber, it defines the scope of the project (its emphasis is on dreamless as opposed to dream-filled sleep, and on ‘ordinary’ sleep as opposed to such exotic variants as somnambulism or trance); and it proposes that, despite its seemingly nondescript uneventfulness, sleep’s very resistance to narrative is the condition of its narratability in the novel.
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- 1.
Aristotle, ‘On Sleep’ [ca. 350 BC], in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1: 721–28 (721).
- 2.
Cited in Peretz Lavie, The Enchanted World of Sleep, trans. Anthony Berris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 146. Kleitman opens his magisterial work Sleep and Wakefulness with brisk definitions of his key terms and the complementary (as opposed to antithetical) relation between them. Nathaniel Kleitman, Sleep and Wakefulness, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 3–5. For the beginnings of research into ‘being awake’ as an intellectual category in its own right, see the special number of Anthropology of Consciousness 24, no. 2 (2013) edited by Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer.
- 3.
In recent years there has been a renewal of interest in the philosophy of sleep. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), begins as a reflection on the impossibility of a first-person experience of sleep. See also Simon Morgan Wortham, The Poetics of Sleep from Aristotle to Nancy (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) on sleep as the unthinkable ‘other’ of mainstream western philosophy.
- 4.
Michael J. Thorpy, ‘History of Sleep and Man’, in The Encyclopedia of Sleep and Sleep Disorders, ed. Charles P. Pollak, Michael J. Thorpy and Jan Yager, 3rd ed. (New York: Facts on File, 2010), xvii–xxxviii, provides a succinct account of the evolution of medical and scientific understandings of sleep from antiquity to the present. Francis Schiller, ‘Semantics of Sleep’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 56, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 377–97, traces a lexical history of sleep and sleep-related terms—‘vigil’, ‘wakefulness’, ‘circadian’, ‘narcolepsy’, ‘coma’—via the developments in scientific and medical understandings of somnolence from classical antiquity to modern neuroscience; along the way, his article also glances at some quaint items from the forgotten or obsolete vocabulary of sleep (‘agrypnia’, ‘nychthermal’, ‘somnosis’).
- 5.
For an informative overview of the physiological and evolutionary functions of human sleep, see Carol M. Worthman, ‘After Dark: The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Sleep’, in Evolutionary Medicine and Health: New Perspectives, ed. Wenda R. Trevathan, E. O. Smith and James J. McKenna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 291–313.
- 6.
Steven W. Lockley and Russell G. Foster, Sleep: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 47.
- 7.
See, for example, J. Allan Hobson, ‘Sleep is of the Brain, by the Brain and for the Brain’, Nature 437, no. 27 (October 2005): 1254–56; Lulu Xie et al., ‘Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain’, Science 342, no. 6156 (18 October 2013): 373–77.
- 8.
Homer, The Iliad, trans. Martin Hammond (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 226; Sir Philip Sidney, ‘Astrophil and Stella’, Sonnet 39, line 4, in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 168; Miguel De Cervantes, Don Quixote, ed. E. C. Riley, trans. Charles Jarvis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 909.
- 9.
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners [1939] (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 160–68 (163). See also Sasha Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 108–48, for the invention in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of what we would recognize as the modern bedroom. Handley’s account of the ‘progressive specialisation of sleeping chambers’ (179) in western households nevertheless emphasizes that the practice of bed-sharing between friends and even strangers persisted well into the eighteenth century; her research thus provides a valuable corrective to the notion of a ‘straightforward march of sleep-privacy’ (179) that dominates Elias’s influential version of the history of sleep. Peter N. Stearns, Perrin Rowland and Lori Giarnella, in ‘Children’s Sleep: Sketching Historical Change’, Journal of Social History 30, no. 2 (1996): 345–66, though their primary focus is on childhood slumber, provide a richly evidenced discussion of changing sleep beliefs and regimes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- 10.
A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime (New York: Norton, 2005), 300–23, focuses on pre-industrial sleep; his follow-up article, ‘The Modernization of Western Sleep: Or, Does Insomnia Have a History?’ Past & Present 226, no. 1 (2015): 149–92, takes the story from the industrial revolution to the early twentieth century. See also Benjamin Reiss, Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 23–55, for a wide-ranging discussion of the variety of sleeping practices that preceded the ‘industrial age of sleep’ (55).
- 11.
Reiss, Wild Nights, 24.
- 12.
Wortham, The Poetics of Sleep, 84; emphasis in original.
- 13.
Carol M. Worthman and Melissa K. Melby, ‘Towards a Comparative Developmental Ecology of Human Sleep’, in Adolescent Sleep Patterns: Biological, Social, and Psychological Influences, ed. Mary A. Carskadon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 69–117 (70–71).
- 14.
There is of course the danger that fieldwork on sleep in present-day non-western communities might be thought of as providing us with a retrospective glimpse of the prehistory of ‘modern’ sleep rather than access to a rival manifestation of the modern. See Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, ‘Can We Ever Know the Sleep of Our Ancestors?’ Sleep and Health 2, no. 1 (March 2016): 4–5.
- 15.
Worthman and Melby, ‘Towards a Comparative Developmental Ecology of Human Sleep’, is both a detailed rebuttal of the allegation that anthropologists know nothing about sleep and a frank admission of the limits of what they do know. Brigitte Steger and Lodewijk Brunt, eds, Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the Dark Side of Life (London: Routledge, 2003), which includes essays on nocturnal culture in China, Japan, India and Scotland, represents a landmark in the study of sleep by social scientists. The same editors’ equally eclectic Worlds of Sleep (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2008) offers itself as a contribution to the new field of ‘dormatology’ (17). The term hasn’t caught on, but the influence of Steger and Brunt’s pioneering dormatological works is nevertheless visible in, for example, Katie Glaskin and Richard Chenhall, eds, Sleep around the World: Anthropological Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013) and Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), the latter a study of ways in which modern US sleep has been constructed, regulated and medicalized—and exported as a global norm.
- 16.
The idea of a geography of sleep was first floated as a joke by Neil Smith in ‘Rethinking Sleep’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14 (1996): 505–06, an article designed to satirize contemporary cultural studies for its pious over-theorization of everyday life as a site of ‘transgressive, counter-hegemonic’ practice (506). Yet Smith’s article opens up possibilities beyond its immediate satiric purposes. See, for example, Peter Kraftl and John Horton, ‘Spaces of Every-night Life: For Geographies of Sleep, Sleeping and Sleepiness’, Progress in Human Geography 32, no. 4 (2008): 509–24 and Paul Harrison, ‘In the Absence of Practice’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 987–1009.
- 17.
Vilhelm Aubert and Harrison White, ‘Sleep: A Sociological Interpretation I’, Acta Sociologica 4, no. 2 (1959): 46–54 (46).
- 18.
See especially: Aubert and White, ‘Sleep: A Sociological Interpretation I’, and ‘Sleep: A Sociological Interpretation II’, Acta Sociologica 4, no. 3 (1959): 1–16; Barry Schwartz, ‘Notes on the Sociology of Sleep’, The Sociological Quarterly 11, no. 4 (1970): 485–99; Robert Meadows, ‘“The Negotiated Night”: An Embodied Conceptual Framework for the Sociological Study of Sleep’, The Sociological Review 53, no. 2 (2005): 240–54; Simon J. Williams, Sleep and Society: Sociological Ventures into the (Un)known (London: Routledge, 2005). Key interventions in this emerging field are gathered in Eric L. Hsu’s four-volume anthology, Sleep (London: Routledge, 2016).
- 19.
See Williams, Sleep and Society, 74, for a sketch of the ‘rights and responsibilities’ of the sleeper.
- 20.
Simon J. Williams, The Politics of Sleep: Governing (Un)consciousness in the Late Modern Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011) is a wide-ranging study that covers the erosion of sleep by fast capitalism, the biopolitical governance of dormant bodies, tensions over the ‘rights’ of the sleeper and the contemporary biomedicalization of sleep. Much more sharply polemical is Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013), which argues that sleep has been a primary casualty of a capitalist world characterized by ‘a generalized inscription of human life into duration without breaks, defined by a principle of continuous functioning’ (8). Alexei Penzin, Rex Exsomnis: Sleep and Subjectivity in Capitalist Modernity (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2012) similarly argues that ‘the capitalist order of modernity privileges wakeful and active time over passiveness and non-productivity (having as its horizon a “total” wakefulness)’ (loc. 163 of 532).
- 21.
Benjamin Reiss, ‘Sleeping at Walden Pond: Thoreau, Abnormal Temporality, and the Modern Body’, American Literature 85, no. 1 (2013): 5–31 (6).
- 22.
Benjamin Reiss, ‘Sleep’s Hidden Histories’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 15 February 2014.
- 23.
Reiss, ‘Sleeping at Walden Pond’, 6.
- 24.
Important overviews of sleep in the visual arts include Sheila McNally, ‘Ariadne and Others: Images of Sleep in Greek and Early Roman Art’, Classical Antiquity 4, no. 2 (1985): 152–92; Millard Meiss, ‘Sleep in Venice. Ancient Myths and Renaissance Proclivities’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110, no. 5 (1966): 348–82; Maria Ruvoldt, The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dream (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Nathaniel Wallace, Scanning the Hypnoglyph: Sleep in Modernist and Postmodern Representation (Leiden: Brill, 2016), provides a stimulating account of sleep in the contemporary visual imagination. An excellent introduction to the literary history of sleep is provided by Lee Scrivner, ‘That Sweet Secession: Sleep and Sleeplessness in Western Literature’, in Sleep: Multi-Professional Perspectives, ed. Andrew Green, Alex Westcombe and Ved Varma (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2012), 268–90, which touches on myth, folklore, drama, fiction and poetry in a succinct but incisive discussion.
- 25.
Walter de la Mare, ed., Behold, This Dreamer! Of Reverie, Night, Sleep, Dream, Love-Dreams, Nightmare, Death, the Unconscious, the Imagination, Divination, the Artist, and Kindred Subjects (London: Faber and Faber, 1939).
- 26.
The most authoritative work on sleep in early modern literature, Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr’s, Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment: Vitality from Spenser to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), explores sleep as a state in which both traditional generic boundaries (between romance and epic) and ontological boundaries (between human, animal and vegetal) are blurred, problematized and renegotiated. See also David Roberts, ‘Sleeping Beauties: Shakespeare, Sleep and the Stage’, The Cambridge Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2006): 231–54, which contains extremely informative summaries of references to sleep in the Bible (240 n.31) and in Homer (245 n.46), and draws an elegantly chiastic distinction between ‘Homeric’ sleep and ‘Shakespearean’ sleep, where the former is used to ‘suspend narrative’ (as when gods and mortals alike are plunged into sleep in the Iliad) and the latter to ‘narrate suspense’ (as when Othello hovers by the slumbering Desdemona with loving words and murderous intent) (251). David Bevington’s informative survey, ‘Asleep on Stage’, in From Page to Performance: Essays in English Drama in Memory of Arnold Williams, ed. John A. Alford (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 51–84, examines the various connotations of sleep—human frailty, spiritual unpreparedness, imminent victimhood, self-indulgent laziness, magical transformation—in a range of theatrical texts from the liturgical drama of the twelfth century through to Shakespeare.
- 27.
Elisha Cohn, Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), dwells illuminatingly on states of reverie, trance and sleep in nineteenth-century Bildungsromans by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. Peter Schwenger, At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2012), a book ‘not about sleep but about sleep’s edges’ (vii), examines the phenomena of drowsiness, hypnagogia, insomnia, awakening and dreams in a range of modern experimental fiction (James Joyce, Fernando Pessoa, Marcel Proust, Antonio Tabucchi, Virginia Woolf), poetry and philosophy. Herschel Farbman’s The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), speculates on ‘experiences of waking in the very depths of sleep’ (5) in Freud, Blanchot, Beckett and Joyce. Wallace, Scanning the Hypnoglyph, is a deftly erudite piece of inter-art criticism that examines the presence of the ‘hypnoglyph’—or ‘sleep-centred work of art’ (9)—in fiction, poetry, painting, photography and sculpture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- 28.
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy [1767], ed. Ian Campbell Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 226.
- 29.
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel [1927] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 55.
- 30.
Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 61.
- 31.
Scrivner, ‘That Sweet Secession’, 269.
- 32.
Plato, The Laws [ca. 348 BC], trans. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 198.
- 33.
Aubert and White, ‘Sleep: A Sociological Interpretation I’, 54.
- 34.
Wallace, Scanning the Hypnoglyph, 97.
- 35.
Wallace, Scanning the Hypnoglyph, 18.
- 36.
Cohn, Still Life, 4. Cohn valuably studies the lyric moments of trance-like inattentiveness in Victorian fiction that tentatively ‘suspend’ the onward teleological march of the narrative of Bildung without being recuperable as anything as crude as resistance or opposition. The focus of Cohn’s study is largely on modes of diminished or attenuated consciousness—that is, on what she refers to as an ‘unknown and unknowable sleep of the mind’ (185) rather than on the sleep of the body. Most of the emphasis of Still Life falls on the mental states of major focalizing characters; it does not dwell on the sleepiness of marginal characters or the use of sleep to marginalize them. The other notable quality of Still Life is the dependably nuanced, highbrow and sophisticatedly indeterminate nature of daydreaming and reverie that it dwells on, often making the Victorian novel feel quasi-Proustian in its engagement with the phenomenology of somnolence (see, for example the discussion of the ‘sleeping’ narrator of George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss [82–86]). What’s missing from Cohn’s study is any sense of sleepiness as a potentially undignified, awkward, mistimed, slapstick or grotesque bodily state—which is to say that Still Life, for all its critical finesse, doesn’t equip us to come to terms with the comic semiotics of sleep that will be visible in Austen, Dickens and even—little though his readers have remarked on it—Proust.
- 37.
For informative introductions to the territory of unnatural or exotic somnolence in modern culture, see Daniel Pick, Svengali’s Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998); and Antonio Melechi, Fugitive Minds: On Madness, Sleep and Other Twilight Afflictions (London: Heinemann, 2003).
- 38.
Philip Young, ‘Fallen from Time: The Mythic Rip van Winkle’, Kenyon Review 22, no. 4 (1960): 547–73, locates the antecedents of Washington Irving’s famous sleeper in a host of mythological and religious narratives of miraculously prolonged sleep, a roll-call that includes: Arthur, Merlin, John the Divine, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, William Tell, Odin, Endymion, Siegfried, Oisin, Sleeping Beauty, Bruennhilde, and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. For a discussion of the trope of suspended animation in science fiction, see my ‘Suspended Animation: Futures of Technophobia’, in Technicity, ed. Arthur Bradley and Louis Armand (Prague: Litteraria Pragnesia, 2006), 346–69.
- 39.
For critical and theoretical perspectives on literature, dreams and narrative, see Maurice Blanchot, ‘Dreaming, Writing’, in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 140–48; Carol Schreier Rupprecht, ed., The Dream and the Text: Essays on Literature and Language (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993); Bert O. States, Dreaming and Storytelling (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Patricia Kilroe, ‘The Dream as Text, The Dream as Narrative’, Dreaming 10, no. 3 (2000): 125–37; Richard Walsh, ‘Dreaming and Narrative Theory’, in Towards a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010), 141–58.
- 40.
Penzin, Rex Exsomnis, loc. 120 of 532. Cf. also Roland Barthes’s argument that dreams have the effect of putting sleep to work by focusing on the output of the sleeper’s unconscious mind—thereby making what he calls the ‘utopia of sleep’, the state in which one is liberated from the responsibility of labouring at the job of being oneself, once more a symbolically productive state, a busy workshop of the unconscious. Roland Barthes, The Neutral, trans. Rosalind E. Kraus and Dennis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 37.
- 41.
Eluned Summers-Bremner, Insomnia: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion, 2008), 117.
- 42.
Lee Scrivner, Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014).
- 43.
Summers-Bremner, Insomnia: A Cultural History, 125.
- 44.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited [1967] (London: Penguin, 2000), 77.
- 45.
Nabokov’s words invite comparison with the early modern tradition in which political sovereignty is associated with the transcendence of the ordinary human need for sleep. For a discussion of kingly insomnia and ‘hyper-humanness’ in Shakespeare, see Sullivan, Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment, 91–96 (95).
- 46.
Ernest L. Fontana, ‘Literary Insomnia’, New Orleans Review 17, no. 2 (1990): 38–42, provides a short but useful introduction to an inexhaustible topic. See also Eluned Summers-Bremner, ‘Sleep’s Guile: Insomnia and the Work of Art’, in Witness to Pain: Essays on the Translation of Pain into Art, ed. Pascual Nieves (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 99–124 and Schwenger’s discussion of the ‘insomniac writer’ in At the Borders of Sleep, 57–76.
- 47.
Maurice Blanchot, in ‘Sleep, Night’, in The Space of Literature [1952], trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 264–68, conceptualizes insomnia as a challenge to the definitive recentring of subjectivity in sleep. Emmanuel Levinas, in Existence and Existents [1947], trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 61–70, similarly views insomnia as a disturbing glimpse of the sheer impersonality of an existence to which all human subjects—or ‘existents’, as he calls them—are willy-nilly tethered.
- 48.
In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce famously suggests that only an ‘ideal reader with an ideal insomnia’ would be equal to the task of fathoming the labyrinthine allusiveness and multilingual wordplay of his final, monumental novel. Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1939), 120.
- 49.
See Jean-Louis Chrétien, ‘A Polyptych of Slumbers’, in Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 62–80, for a meditation on the presence of scenes of watched sleep—inspired either by biblical narrative or by Greek mythology—in western visual art from Mantegna to Delacroix. See also Leo Steinberg, ‘Picasso’s Sleepwatchers’, in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 93–114.
- 50.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘David Swan: A Fantasy’, in Twice-Told Tales (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 183–90.
- 51.
Roland Barthes, ‘Day by Day with Roland Barthes’, in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 98–117 (112).
- 52.
Sullivan, Sleep, Romance and Human Embodiment, 79.
- 53.
Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 77.
- 54.
Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 162.
- 55.
Barthes, The Neutral, 37.
- 56.
See, for example, Arianna Huffington, The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time (New York: Harmony Books, 2016).
References
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Aubert, Vilhelm, and Harrison White. 1959a. Sleep: A Sociological Interpretation I. Acta Sociologica 4 (2): 46–54.
———. 1959b. Sleep: A Sociological Interpretation II. Acta Sociologica 4 (3): 1–16.
Barthes, Roland. 1985. Day by Day with Roland Barthes. In On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky, 98–117. Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 2005. The Neutral. Translated by Rosalind E. Kraus and Dennis Hollier. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bevington, David. 1995. Asleep on Stage. In From Page to Performance: Essays in English Drama, ed. John A. Alford, 51–84. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1982. Sleep, Night. In The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, 264–268. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
———. 1997. Dreaming, Writing. In Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, 140–148. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Chrétien, Jean-Louis. 2003. A Polyptych of Slumbers. In Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art, trans. Stephen E. Lewis, 62–80. New York: Fordham University Press.
Cohn, Elisha. 2016. Still Life: Suspended Development in the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso.
De la Mare, Walter. 1939. Behold, This Dreamer! Of Reverie, Night, Sleep, Dream, Love-Dreams, Nightmare, Death, the Unconscious, the Imagination, Divination, the Artist, and Kindred Subjects. London: Faber and Faber.
Ekirch, A. Roger. 2001. Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles. The American Historical Review 106 (2): 343–386.
———. 2005. At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime. New York: Norton.
———. 2015. The Modernization of Western Sleep: Or, Does Insomnia Have a History? Past & Present 226 (1): 149–192.
Elias, Norbert. 2000. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. Oxford: Blackwell.
Farbman, Herschel. 2009. The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature. New York: Fordham University Press.
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Forster, E.M. 1962. Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Glaskin, Katie, and Richard Chenhall, eds. 2013. Sleep around the World: Anthropological Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Greaney, Michael. 2006. Suspended Animation: Futures of Technophobia. In Technicity, ed. Arthur Bradley and Louis Armand, 346–369. Prague: Litteraria Pragnesia.
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———. 2005. Sleep is of the Brain, by the Brain and for the Brain. Nature 437 (27, Oct.): 1254–1256.
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Meiss, Millard. 1966. Sleep in Venice. Ancient Myths and Renaissance Proclivities. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110 (5): 348–382.
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Reiss, Benjamin. 2013. Sleeping at Walden Pond: Thoreau, Abnormal Temporality, and the Modern Body. American Literature 85 (1): 5–31.
———. 2014. Sleep’s Hidden Histories. In Los Angeles Review of Books, 15 February. https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/sleeps-hidden-histories
———. 2017. Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. New York: Basic Books.
Roberts, David. 2006. Sleeping Beauties: Shakespeare, Sleep and the Stage. The Cambridge Quarterly 35 (3): 231–254.
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Scrivner, Lee. 2014. Becoming Insomniac: How Sleeplessness Alarmed Modernity. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
———. 2012. That Sweet Secession: Sleep and Sleeplessness in Western Literature. In Sleep: Multi-Professional Perspectives, ed. Andrew Green, Alex Westcombe, and Ved Varma, 268–290. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Smith, Neil. 1996. Rethinking Sleep. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14: 505–506.
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Stearns, Peter N., Perrin Rowland, and Lori Giarnella. 1996. Children’s Sleep: Sketching Historical Change. Journal of Social History 30 (2): 345–366.
Steger, Brigitte, and Lodewijk Brunt, eds. 2003. Night-time and Sleep in Asia and the West: Exploring the Dark Side of Life. London: Routledge.
———, eds. 2008. Worlds of Sleep. Berlin: Frank & Timme.
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Greaney, M. (2018). Introduction. In: Sleep and the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75253-2_1
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