The Good Places of Sleep: Nineteenth-Century Utopian Fictions and Sleep Research
We seem obsessed by the quality of our sleep in the early twenty-first century, yet the high point of sleep research was the second half of the nineteenth century, and particularly the period from 1880-1900, when modern sleep studies began. For the Victorians, sleep was an active state, (linked often to other cognitive pathologies and dissonances such as catalepsy and epilepsy) which enabled or disabled certain functions of mind and body. How one slept was therefore of considerable interest to the general public as well as to physiologists, physicians and neurologists. Concurrent with this avid attention to the epistemologies of sleep, utopian fictions employed sleep as a foundation for asking questions of ideal lives and worlds. Often, other worlds were entered through the medium of sleep. This seminar will consider the connections between sleep and utopia and ask whether sleep is itself a good place.
Date: 7 November 2017, 17:30
Venue: St Anne's College, Woodstock Road OX2 6HS
Venue Details: Seminar Room 3
Speaker: Professor Martin Willis (Cardiff University)
Organising department: Faculty of English Language and Literature
Part of: Science, Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Laura Spence