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Sleepwalking, Subjectivity and the Nervous Body in Eighteenth‐Century Britain
Author(s) -
HANDLEY SASHA
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/j.1754-0208.2011.00418.x
Subject(s) - sleepwalking , sensibility , context (archaeology) , romanticism , subjectivity , identity (music) , situated , history , aesthetics , personal identity , sociology , psychoanalysis , psychology , literature , philosophy , epistemology , art , psychiatry , self , social psychology , archaeology , cognition , sleep disorder , artificial intelligence , computer science
This article offers an in‐depth study of sleepwalking in the long eighteenth century. It explores how and why the physical condition of sleepwalking was conceptually transformed into a modish nervous disorder that was central to explorations of the human mind, imagination and personal identity in the final decades of the century. This cultural revaluation of sleepwalking, or ‘somnambulism’ as it was increasingly termed, is situated within the context of late seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century medical and philosophical thought surrounding the physical act of sleep and its disorders, and within the cults of sensibility and Romanticism.