A Critical Survey of Scholarship on Literature and the Victorian Science of Dreams

What is it about?

The aim of this essay is to provide an overview of recent scholarship on specific kinds of sleep and dream-states in 19th-century literature and science and to note areas where there is an apparent dearth in order to encourage further research. The categories surveyed here are general studies of sleep and dream-states, mesmerism and related trance-like states (such as hypnotism and animal magnetism), déjà vu, and nightmares or Incubus (more recently termed “sleep paralysis”). Given the plurality and fluidity of historical approaches to understanding “dreamy” mental states, this survey will expand the contemporary literary corpus on dream-states by including historical, scientific, anthropological, and other studies alongside literary criticism in order to suggest possible points of comparison across disciplines that have not been fully explored.

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Why is it important?

As this survey will demonstrate, Victorian discussions of dream-states were highly interdisciplinary in nature, and so reading different contemporary methodological approaches to these topics can illuminate ideas, questions, and points of interest that are not necessarily apparent from a single theoretical or disciplinary perspective. This multi-discipline approach allows for a more pluralistic account of scholarship on Victorian dream-states and will encourage greater cross-talk among scholars and journals about Victorian dream-states and their continuing relevance in contemporary literature, culture, and science.

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