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A study of the history of modern insomnia, this book explores how poets, journalists, and doctors of the Victorian period found themselves in near-universal agreement that modernity and sleep were somehow incompatible. It investigates how psychologists, philosophers and literary artists worked to articulate its causes, and its potential cures.

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Prologomenon 1. A Modern Insomnia 2. The Freeing of the Will 3. The Narrowing of the Attention 4. In Vicious Circles: The Physiologies of Exhaustion 5. Mental Hyperactivity and the Hematologies of Sleep 6. Psychologorrhea 7. Slumber and Self Subdivided 8. Prostheses and Antitheses 9. Insomniac Modernism 10. Volitional Regress and Egress

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"...richly detailed and thorough in its research, Becoming Insomniac will no doubt prove a piquant counterpoint and complement to works such as Anson Rabinbach´s The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (1990). Certainly, Scrivner has produced a novel and engaging study. Through uniting psychological, philosophical and literary perspectives, his history occupies a singular interdisciplinary nexus, offering much to the evaluation of insomnia as it was perceived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and indeed in the Internet age." - Eleanor Dobson, Cultural History

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Lee Scrivner has taught English and the Humanities at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA; The University of London, Birkbeck, UK; and at Bo?azi‡i University in Istanbul, Turkey. He currently resides in Colombia with his wife and three sons.

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