Sleep Fictions

Abstract

Sleep Fictions argues that US literature provided its own response to the nation’s Progressive-Era obsession with wakefulness. Narratives by authors Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman emerged at a time when conceptions of rest were reshaped by the coalescence of America’s Protestant work ethic and industrial advancement. Marginalized literary figures suffer amid the permeating sprawl of modernity, with its artificial light, traffic commotion, and twenty-four-hour productivity, as they are constantly compelled by the cultural clock and pushed beyond bodily limits within an increasingly mechanized world. Even now, popular US print culture is rife with anxieties about sleep, yet scholarship lacks an in-depth exploration of how these concerns emerged in fin de siècle US literature. Complementing the book is a Scalar digital humanities companion, a digital archive of primary texts intertextualized through sleep-themed tag visualizations, ranging from the Sleeping Beauty trope and neurasthenia to the criminality of sleep and pseudoscience. Alongside its digital component, Sleep Fictions shines a much-needed light on the pivotal yet enigmatic role sleep plays in American life, offering humanities scholars new ways to understand the circumscription of sleep and social agency in the modern age.