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Full Description
The literary response to the dawning cult of wakefulness A turn-of-the-century influx of new technologies and the enormous impact of the electric light transformed not only individual sleeping habits but the ways American culture conceived and valued sleep. Hannah L. Huber analyzes the works of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Charles Chesnutt, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to examine the literary response to the period's obsession with wakefulness. As these writers blurred the separation of public and private space, their characters faced exhaustion in a modern world that permeated every moment of their lives with artificial light, traffic noise, and the social pressure to remain active at all hours. The implacable cultural clock and constant stress over physical limitations had an even greater impact on marginalized figures. Huber pays particular attention to how these writers rebutted Americans' confidence in the body's ability to conquer sleep with vivid portraits of the devastating consequences of sleep disruption and deprivation.
The author also provides a website and text visualization tool that offers readers an interdisciplinary, deconstructed analysis of the book's primary texts. The website can be found at: https://sleepfictions.org/sleep/scalar/index
Contents
Acknowledgements Introduction From Mystery to Medicine: Diagnosing Sleep in American Literature
"The Most Restless of Mortals": Patronage and Somnambulism in Henry James's Roderick Hudson
"A Monst'us Pow'ful Sleeper": Resisting the Master Clock in Charles Chesnutt's "Uncle Julius" Tales
"A Great Blaze of Electric Light": Illuminating Sleeplessness in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth
"Rest and Power": The Social Currency of Sleep in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Forerunner
Conclusion Notes
References
Index
