Sleep and the Novel: Fictions of Somnolence from Jane Austen to the Present

Sleep and the Novel is a study of representations of the sleeping body in fiction from 1800 to the present day which traces the ways in which novelists have engaged with this universal, indispensable -- but seemingly nondescript -- region of human experience. Covering the narrativization of sleep in Austen, the politicization of sleep in Dickens, the queering of sleep in Goncharov, the aestheticization of sleep in Proust, and the medicalization of sleep in contemporary fiction, it examines the ways in which novelists envision the figure of the sleeper, the meanings they discover in human sleep, and the values they attach to it. It argues that literary fiction harbours, on its margins, a “sleeping partner”, one that we can nickname the Schlafroman or “sleep-novel”, whose quiet absorption in the wordlessness and passivity of human slumber subtly complicates the imperatives of self-awareness and purposive action that traditionally govern the novel. 

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction.- 2. “The Yawns of Lady Bertram”: Sleep, Subjectivity and Sociability in Jane Austen.- 3. “Snoring for the Million”: Dickens the Sleep-watcher.- 4. From Bildungsroman to Schlafroman: Goncharov’s Oblomov.- 5. Proust and the Sleep of Others.- 6. “Observed, Measured, Contained”: Contemporary Fiction and the Science of Sleep.- 7. Conclusion: “A World Without a Lullaby”?.

About the Author :
Michael Greaney is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Conrad, Language and Narrative (2001) and Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory (2006). He has published widely on sleep studies, and is one of the co-founders of the website ‘Sleep Cultures’, an online hub for humanities scholars working in the field of sleep studies. 

Review :
“With Sleep and the Novel, Michael Greaney makes a valuable contribution to an under-researched area of the novel and makes a good case for ways in which attention to sleep—and expressly not dream sleep—might, despite its marginal position in narrative, have wider-ranging effects on our reading. … Fluent, attentive, and engaging, this is a book that deserves to be read.” (Stephen Thomson, The Review of English Studies, September, 2018)